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SCHUSINGKLffiRjJ|Y

RS LY5UI F

THE*

"*J

BEING

Kirkl

8M6.4 K5<]

RADCLIFFE COLLEGE LIBRARY

Schlesinger Library

BOUGHT WITH MONEY

RECEIVED

FROM LIBRARY FINES

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*p »toifre* fettMan*

THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN.
THE OLD DILLER PLACE. Illustrated.
THE BOY-EDITOR. Illustrated.
THE HOME-COMERS. Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and Nbw York

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Th* J°y s °f Being a Woman

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The
Joys of Being a Woman

AND OTHER PAPERS

WINIFRED KIRKLAND
U

BOSTON & NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Cte SMteMftr 9mw CmMHi

I918

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Published August 1918

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FOREWORD

The Ego in the Essay

We are each launched in life with an elfin
shipmate — set jogging upon earth beside a
fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he
pipes magic music; when our feet are free
he pleads with us to follow him on witching
paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often
follow, but when we do, we know him for
what he is; when we sail or run or fly with
him, we know him for the gladdest fellow with
whom life ever paired us, a companion rarely
glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true
Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes
snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part,
for his waggishness and his wanderings, he
demands, not the strait-jacketing of poetry,
but the flexible garment of prose. It is the
shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever
best expressed him.

One man there was in that peopled past,
where friendship's best doors fly open at our
knock, who knew how to catch his elusive
Ego and keep it glad even on ways that led

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Foreword

through sordid counting-house and sadder
madhouse; and who knew also, better than
any one since has ever known, how to envisage
and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet,
quaint sprite that it was, in an essay. Ever
since that time those of us who love essays
say, of one possessing special grace, it is like
Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's
style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as
only the essay can do, personality.

Of all literary forms the personal essay ap-
pears the most artless, a little boat that sails
us into pleasant havens, without any sound
of machinery and without any chart or com-
pass. To read is as if we overheard some one
chatting with that little merry-heart, his own
particular Ego. We do not stop to think what
childlike simplicities any grown-up must at-
tain before he can hear that fairy divinity,
his own Self, speak at all, for the only true
tongue in which the Self speaks is joy. Only
childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. The
self-annalist whose essays warm our hearts
with friendship, must be one who sips the
wine of mirth when all alone with his own
Self. Not many such are born, and fewer of
them write essays. The essay is no easy thing.
The true mood and the true manner of it are
rare. It is as difficult to write an essay on
vi

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Foreword

purpose as it is to be a person on purpose, a
teasing game and unsatisfactory.

Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are
offset by the delights: for there is nothing so
compelling to expression as chuckle, and that
is what the true essay is, sheer chuckle; it is
what we felt and saw that time the elfin Ego
floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us,
laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun.
Then off we fly to write it, with the spell still
upon us! The poising of a word on the tip of
our pen until the very most genial sunbeam of
all shall touch it, the weaving the thread of a
golden thought in and out through all the
quips and nonsense, the wrapping a whole
life experience in the hollow shaft of some
light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the
humorous essay is that the reader shall smile,
not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall re-
member no one passage at which he smiles:
it is far better that he should feel that he
has touched a personality tipped with mirth.
Ariel never laughed. The fun that makes the
soul expand must have in it the lift of wings
and the glimpsing fantasy of flight.

More than any other of the shapes prose
takes, the essay should give the reader a sense
of good-fellowship. Probably the writer who
as an actual man is shyest, gives this com-

vii

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Foreword

radeship best. The shy man sheds forth his
personality most opulently in print, and pref-
erably, as certain wise editors have perceived,
in anonymous print. One is sensitive to hav-
ing an everyday friend see one's soul in pub-
lic, because the everyday friend knows too
well the everyday self, to which the elusive
essay-self is too often a stranger.

That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the hum-
drum man or woman who bears our mortal
name, if he only came to visit us oftener,
stayed with us longer, what essays we might
write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of laughter,
a flutter of wings, if he would only linger un-
til I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of
mine, who tells such happy secrets! Poor
babykin, poor fairykin — that Ego sent forth
with us to make blithe the voyage, we cannot
go a-dancing with him out to fairy fields, be-
cause our feet are heavy with Other People's
clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he
would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies
— our own Self s and no one's else, because
of the grave grubby Book-people who thunder
at us from our shelves. Sometimes I catch
him casting a waggish twinkle at me over the
very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow
wings and head that is devil-may-care trying
to get at me from behind her sable-stoled form,
viii

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Foreword

Even in the thought of death I catch his
cherub chuckle, "Could a grave hold me?"
For is not death also a bugbear of Other Peo-
ple, not at all of my own Self's making?

Gay little voyager! He seems, when he vis-
its me, to be the prince of the kingdom of fun.
He does not stay long, but long enough some-
times for me to write an essay. But whence
he comes, or whither he goes, or what he is,
whether demonic or divine, I only know that
he is mine.

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CONTENTS

Foreword: The Ego in the Essay
I. The Joys of Being a Woman
II. A Man in the House

III. Old-Clothes Sensations .

IV. Luggage and the Lady .
V. Detached Thoughts on Boarding

VI. The Lady Alone at Night .
VII. In Sickness and in Health .
VIII. An Educational Fantasy

IX. My Clothes

X. The Tendency to Testify .
XL Letters and Letter-Writers
XII. The Tyranny of Talent

XIII. The Woman Who Writes

XIV. Picnic Pictures .

XV. The Farm Feminine .

XVI. A Little Girl and Her
mother ....

XVII. The Wayfaring Woman

XVIII. The Road That Talked

Grand-

23
29

35
49
62
68

107

»3
124

129

154
171

183

194
205

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Contents

XIX. My Mother's Gardeners . . 214

XX. My Little Town 227

XXI. Genus Clericum 244

XXII. Some Difficulties in Doing with-
out Eternity 264

Note. — Several of these essays have appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, The North American
Review, The Unpopular Review, and The
Churchman, and are here reprinted with the kind
permission of the editors of those magazines.

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The Joys of Being a Woman

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The Joys of Being a Woman

SOME years ago there appeared in the
"Atlantic" an essay entitled "The Joys
of Being a Negro." With a purpose analogous
to that of the author, I am moved to declare
the real delights of the apparently down-
trodden, and in the face of a bulky literature
expressive of pathos and protest, to confess
frankly the joys of being a woman. It is a
feminist argument accepted as axiomatic that
every woman would be a man if she could be,
while no man would be a woman if he could
help it. Every woman knows this is not fact
but falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of
those falsehoods on which depends the sta-
bility of the universe. The idea that every
woman is desirous of becoming a man is as
comforting to every male as its larger corol-
lary is alarming, namely, that women as a
mass have resolved to become men. The for-
mer notion expresses man's view of feminin-
ity, and is flattering; the latter expresses his
view of feminism, and is fearsome. Man's
panic, indeed, before the hosts he thinks he

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The Joys of Being a Woman

sees advancing, has lately become so acute
that there is danger of his paralysis. Now his
paralysis would defeat not only the purposes
of feminism, but also the sole purpose of
woman's conduct toward man from Eve's
time to ours, a course of which feminism is
only a modern and consistent example.

It is for man's reassurance that I shall en-
deavor gradually to unfold this age-old pur-
pose, showing that while the privileges which
through slow evolution we have amassed are
so enjoyable as to preclude our envying any
man his dusty difficulties, still our attitude
toward these our toys is that of a friend of
mine, a woman, aged four. Left unprotected
in her hands for entertainment, a male coeval
was heard to burst into cries of rage. Her
parents, rushing to his rescue, found their
daughter surrounded by all the playthings,
which she loftily withheld from her visitor's
hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous re-
sponse, "I am only trying to teach .Bobby to
be unselfish."

The austere moral intention of my little
friend was her direct heritage from her mother
Eve, whose much maligning would be regret-
table if this very maligning were not the
primary purpose of the artful allegory: Adam
and all his sons had to believe that they

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Th* J°y s °J Being a Woman

amounted to more than Eve, as the primary
condition of their amounting to anything.
Eve, in her campaign for Adam's education,
was the first woman to perceive his need for
complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity,
she undertook to immolate her reputation for
his sake. Eve, I repeat, was the first woman
to perceive Adam's fundamental need, but
she was not the last.

The romance of Adam and Eve was written
by so subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the
novelist must have been a woman. Her death-
less allegory of Eden contains the whole sit-
uation of the sexes: it shows the superiority
of woman, while seeming, for his own good,
to show the superiority of man. As it must
have required a woman to write the par-
able, so perhaps it requires a woman to ex-
pound it.

I pass over the initial fact that the repre-
sentation of Eve as the last in an ascending
order of creation, plainly signifies that she is
to be considered the most nearly, if not the
absolutely, perfect, of created things. The
first thing of real impbrtance in the narrative
is the purpose of Eve's creation, to fill a need,
Adam's. "It was not good that the man
should be alone." The whole universe was
not enough for Adam without Eve. It neither

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The Joys of Being a Woman

satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish,
dumpish, unconscionably lazy. If he had been
merely lonely, why would it not have been
enough to create another Adam? Because the
object was not simple addition, whereby an-
other Adam would merely have meant two
Adams, both mopish, dumpish, unconscion-
ably lazy; the object was multiplication by
stimulation, whereby, by combining Eve with
Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows,
was raised to the nth power.

Intimately analyzed, the details of the
temptation redound entirely to Eve's credit.
Woman rather than man is selected as the one
more open to argument, more capable of ini-
tiative, the one bolder to act, as well as braver
to accept the consequences of action. The
sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away for-
ever all claim for masculine originality, and
ascribes initiative in the three departments
of human endeavor to woman. For no one
knows how long, Adam had been bumping
into that tree without once seeing that it was:
(a) "good for food"; this symbolizes the
awakening of the practical instincts, the
availing one's self of one's physical surround-
ings, the germ, clearly, of all commercial ac-
tivity, in which sphere man has always been
judged the more active; (b) "the tree was
4

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The Joys of Being a Woman

pleasant to look upon"; here it is Eve, not
Adam, who perceives the aesthetic aspect; if
man has been adjudged the more eminent in
art, plainly he did not even see that a thing
was beautiful until woman told him so; (c) "a
tree to be desired to make one wise"; Adam
had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated
it, whereas her own desire for knowledge was
so passionate that she was ready to die to
attain it. We all know how Eve's motives
have been impugned, for when a man is ready
to die for knowledge, he is called scientific,
but when a woman is ready to die for knowl-
edge, she is called inquisitive. The Eden nar-
rative concludes with the penalty, "He shall
rule over thee," that is, the price Eve must
pay for Adam's seeming superiority is her
own seeming inferiority. The risk and the
responsibility and the recompense for man's
growing pains, woman has always taken in
inscrutable silence, wise to see that she would
defeat her own ends if she explained.

"And what was my reward when they had won —
Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds?
— They stormed through centuries brandishing their

deeds,
Boasting their gross and transient mastery
To girls, who listened with indulgent ears \
And laughing hearts — Lord, they were ever blind—
Women have they known, but never Woman."

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The Joys of Being a Woman

The methods and the motives of Eve to-
ward Adam have been the methods and the
tnotives of woman with man ever since. Eve's
purposes, summarized, are fourfold: first, she
must educate Adam; second, she must conceal
his education from him, as the only practical
way of developing in man the self-esteem
necessary to keep him in his sex; third, Eve
must never bore Adam, to keep him going she
must always keep him guessing; and fourth,
Eve must not bore herself; this last view of
the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely,
that Eve herself was so bored by the inertness
of Adam and the ennui of Eden that she had
to give him the apple to see what he and she
would do afterwards.

The imperishable philosophy of the third
chapter of Genesis clearly establishes the
primary joy of being a woman, the joy of con-
scious superiority. That it is the most pro-
found joy known to human nature will be
readily attested by any man who has felt his
own sense of superiority shaking in its shoes
as he has viewed the recent much-advertised
achievements of women. How could any man
help envying a woman a self-approval so ab-
solute that it can afford to let man seem su-
perior at her expense?
6

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The Joys of Being a Woman

Woman's conviction of advantage supports
her in using her prerogatives first as if they
were deficiencies, and then in employing them
to offset man's deficiencies. Man is a timor-
ous, self-distrustful creature, who would never
have discovered his powers if not stimulated
by woman's weakness. Probably prehistoric
woman voluntarily gave up her own muscle in
order that man might develop his by serving
her. It is only recently that we have dared to
be as athletic as we might, and the effort is
still tentative enough to be relinquished if we
notice any resulting deterioration, muscular
or moral, in men. Women, conscious how
they hold men's welfare in their hands, simply
do not dare to discover how strong they might
be if they tried, because they have so far used
their physical weakness not only as a means
of arousing men's good activities, but also as
a means of turning to nobler directions their
bad ones. Men are naturally acquisitive, im-
pelled to work for gain and gold, gain and
more gain, gold and more gold. Unable to de-
ter them from this impulse, we turn it to an
unselfish end, that is, we let men support us,
preserving for their sakes the fiction that we
are too frail to support ourselves. If they had
neither child nor wife, men would still be roll-
ing up wealth, but it is very much better for

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The Joys of Being a Woman

their characters that they should suppose they
are working for their families rather than for
themselves. We might be Amazons, but for
men's own sakes we refrain from what would
be for ourselves a selfish indulgence in vigor.
Man is not only naturally acquisitive but
is naturally ostentatious of his acquisitions.
Having bled for his baubles, he wishes to put
them on and strut in them. Again we step" in
and redirect his impulse; we put on his bau-
bles and strut for him. We let him think that
our delicate physique is better fitted for jewels
and silk than his sturdier frame, and that our
complex service to the Society which must be
established to show off his jewels and* silk, is
really a lighter task than his simple slavery to
an office desk. How reluctantly men have
delegated to women dress and all its concom-
itant luxury may readily be proved by an ex-
amination of historic portraits — behold Ral-
eigh in all his ruffles! — and by the tendency
to top-hat and tin-can decoration exhibited by
the male savage. The passionate attention
given by our own household males to those few
articles of apparel in which we have thought
it safe to allow them individual choice, unreg-
ulated by requirements of uniform, articles
such as socks or cravats, must prove even to
men themselves how much safer it is that their
8

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The Joys of Being a Woman

clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed,
that women should do their dressing for them.

Not only for the moral advantages gained
by men in supporting us do women preserve
the fallacy of physical feebleness, but also for
the spiritual exaltation men may enjoy by
protecting us and rescuing us from perils. For
this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the
man should think the peril real, but it is ab-
solutely necessary that he should think the
woman thinks it real. It does a man more good
to save a woman from a mouse than from a
tiger, as contributing more to the sense of
superiority so necessary to him. The truth is
that women are not really afraid of anything,
but they perceive how much splendid incen-
tive would be lost to the world if they did not
pretend to be. For example, if women were
actually afraid of serpents, would the Tempter
have chosen that form just when he wished to
be most ingratiating? But think how many
heroes would be unmade if women should let
men know that they are perfectly capable of
killing their own snakes. The universality
of the mouse fear proves its prehistoric origin,
showing how consistently and successfully
women have been educating men in heroism;
in earliest times it probably required a whole

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The Joys of Being a Woman

dinotherium ramping at the cave-mouth to
induce primitive man to draw weapon in his
mate's defense, but now to evoke the quin-
tessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is
to hop on a chair at sight of a mouse.

Woman's motive for suppressing her intel-
lectual powers is exactly the same as her mo-
tive for not developing her physical powers.
She is ready to enjoy and to employ her own
genius in secret for the sake of the free and
open growth of man's. She has wrought so
conscientiously to this end that it is probable
that the average man's belief in woman's men-
tal inferiority is even stronger than his belief
in her physical inferiority, for well woman has
perceived the peril to man of his ever dis-
covering the truth of her intellectual endow-
ment. Man's energy cannot survive the strain
of thinking his brain inferior, or even equal,
to a woman's. This fact is the reason why
women so long renounced all educational ad-
vantages; that at last their minds were too
much for them, and that they were driven by
pure ebullience of suppressed genius to invade
the university, will more and more be seen
by women to have been a regrettable mis-
take. There is much current newspaper dis-
cussion of the failure of the men's colleges
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Th* J°y s °f Being a Woman

to-day to educate the young male, his utter
obduracy before stimulus is despairingly com-
pared with the effect of college upon the youth
of past generations. I fear that the reason is
simple to seek: men's colleges have deteri-
orated exactly in the ratio that women's col-
leges have improved. The course for women
and women's colleges is therefore clear.

Our history shows that we have, with only
occasional lapses into genius, nobly sustained
the requirements of our unselfishness. On
rare occasions our ability has been so irresist-
ible, and our honesty so irrepressible, that in
an unguarded moment we have tossed off a
Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa Bonheur, a Madame
Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for
the most part we have preserved a glorious
mediocrity that allows man to believe himself
dominant in administration, art, science, war,
and finance. The women who have so far for-
gotten themselves as almost to betray wom-
an's genius to the world, are fortunately for
the moral purpose of the sex, exceptional, and
the average woman makes a very creditable
concealment of intellect. I am hopeful that
as women grow in wisdom, their outbreaks of
ability will be more and more controlled and
sporadic, and man's paralysis before them be
correspondingly infrequent, so that at some

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The Joys of Being a Woman

future day, we may see woman again relin-
quish all educational privileges, and become
wisely illiterate for man's sake.

Our own intellectual advantages are as
much greater than man's as they are more
secret. No woman would put up with the
clumsiness and crudity of a man's brain,
knowing so well the superexcellence of her
own, in the delicacy of its machinery, the
subtle science required in its employment, the
absorbing interest of the material on which it
is employed, and the noble purpose to which
it is solely devoted.

As to our mental mechanism, it is so much
finer than man's that, out of pure pity for his
clogging equipment, we let him think logic
and reason better means of traveling from
premise to conclusion than the air flights we
encourage him to scorn as woman's intuition.
Nothing is more painful to a woman than an
argument with a man, because he journeys
from given fact to deduced truth by pack-
mule, and she by aeroplane. When he finds
her at the destination, he is so irritated by
the swiftness of her passage that he accuses
her of not having followed the right direction,
and demands as proof that she describe the
weeds by the roadside, which he has amply
studied, — he calls this study his reasoning

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The Joys of Being a Woman

process. Of course no woman stops to bot-
anize when the object is to get there. No man
ever wants to be a woman? No man ever
longs to exchange his ass for our airship? No
man ever envies us the nimbleness by which
we can elude logic and get at truth?

Our mental operations are keyed to the
very sublimation of delicacy and rapidity,
and they need to be, considering the sub-
tleties of the skill with which we must em-
ploy them. Eve left it to us to educate Adam
without his knowing it, and to keep him end-
lessly entertained. To educate, to amuse,
and forever, calls for such exquisite manipu-
lation of our own minds, calls for such indi-
vidual initiative, such originality, as to pro-
vide woman with an aspiration that makes
man's creative concern with such gross mat-
ters as art or letters, science or government,
seem puerile and pitiable. What skill do the
tasks of man, so stupidly tangible and pub-
lic, evoke? How stimulating to be a woman!
How dull to amble along like a man, with only
logic to carry you, and only success to attain!

Poor man is to be pitied not only for the
crudity of his mental machinery and the
creaking clumsiness of its movement, but for
the dullness of the material in which he must

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The J°y s °f Being a Woman

work. The truth is that there would be no sex
to do the unskilled labor of the world, if
women ever once let men be tempted by their
superior employments. The surest way of
keeping man to his hod-carrying is to let him
think that woman spends all her secret hours
sobbing for bricks and mortar. As a child
must respect his toys if he is to be happy, so
a man must respect the material he works in,
and thus women foster his pride in making
books, pictures, machines, states, philoso-
phies, while women — make him ! The sub-
ject to which we devote all our heads is man
himself.

" Mine to protect, to nurture, to impel;
My lord and lover, yes, but first my child.
Man remains Man, but Woman is the Mother,
There is no mystery she dare not read;
No fearful fruit can grow, but she must taste;
No secret knowledge can be held from her;
For she must learn all things that she may teach."

Our material, human, living, plastic, is im-
measurably more marvelous than man's cold
stone, cold laws, cold print. Unlike man's,
therefore, our work can never be finished, can
not be qualified and made finite by any stand-
ard of perfection. It is more fun to make a
Plato than to make his philosophy, and at
the same time to be skillful enough to con-
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Th* J°y s °f Being a Woman

ceal our creatorship, knowing that the condi-
tion of producing another and greater Plato
is to let him have the inflation of supposing
he produced himself. Now unless woman's
efforts through all the ages to instill into man
the self-satisfaction necessary to his success
have gone for naught — which I cannot from
observation believe — man could hardly help
envying woman the splendor and the scope
of the subject to which her intelligence is di-
rected, to wit, himself.

The ultimate purpose of woman's educa-
tion of man transcends the grosser aims to
which man's intellect is devoted. Woman
wants man to be good, so that he may be
happy. He was not happy in Eden, and so
she drove him out of it. Woman's education
of man she has for the most part succeeded in
hiding from him, but the object of that educa-
tion, man's happiness, has been so permeat-
ing that even man himself has perceived it.
Man thinks he can manufacture his own
career, his own money, his own clothes, and
his own food, but no man thinks he can make
his own happiness. Every man thinks either
that some actual woman makes or unmakes
his joy, or that some potential woman could
make it. For a woman, love's young dream

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The Joys of Being a Woman

is of making some man happy; for a man,
love's young dream is of letting some woman
make him happy. These views plainly argue
that in relation to the supply of gladness,
woman is the almoner, man the beggar.
Since every one would rather be a giver than
a getter, it seems impossible that no man ever
wants to be a woman, in order to experience
the most indisputable of her joys, the joy of
dispensing joy.

Reasons, however, why men should want
to be women are more numerous and more
cogent than it would be safe to let men know,
so I am cannily concealing many. Among
the few it may not be impolitic to divulge, is
one that of course any man who reads has
seen for himself. While we shall continue
conscientiously devoted to our pedagogical
duties, we have pretty well determined Adam's
limitations, and need only apply to him a
pretty well established curriculum, whereas
we ourselves remain an undeveloped mystery
that more and more attracts our imagina-
tion. Looking far into the future one may see
man finished and fossilized, when woman is
still at the stage of eohippus as

" On five toes he scampered
Over Tertiary rocks."
16

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^&* J°y s °f Being a Woman

Even now women, looking far out to space,
sometimes, echo the glee of little eohippus: —

" I am going to be a horse!
And on my middle finger nails

To run my earthly course!
I 'm going to have a flowing tail!

I 'm going to have a mane!
I 'm going to stand fourteen hands high

On the psychozoic plain! "

Now if any man, clearly perceiving his
own possibilities, must envy woman the joy
of having him for an experiment, how could
the same man, if he should as clearly per-
ceive woman's greater possibilities, help en-
vying woman the joy of having herself for
experiment?

With this paragraph I have plumply ar-
rived at feminism, and at the object of all
my revelations, namely, to reassure men by
stating that women do not intend to take
themselves up as a serious experiment for
ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel
free to do so until we have taught Bobby to
be unselfish enough to let us; he is not yet
strong enough to try his own wings, much
less strong enough to let us try ours. To allay
man's fears, it may be well to elucidate some
aspects of our actions.

While there may be a little of eohippus

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exaltation in feminism, it is so little as to be
negligible; our main purpose is still our age-
old business of teaching by indirection. There
are recurrent occasions when Adam grows
sluggish in his Eden, and women have to con-
trive new spurs both for his action and his
appreciation. As whips to make a lethargic
Adam move where he should move, Eve is
brandishing two threats, one her economic
independence, the other, her Use of the ballot.
Adam thinks she really means to have both.
Now our threatening to march from The
Home and invade business, and by that ac-
tion to let business invade The Home, is very
simply explained. Once again our purpose
is unselfish: it gives Adam false notions of
economic justice to form a habit of not pay-
ing for services rendered, so Eve conquers her
shyness and pretends that she will leave The
Home if he does not pay her some scanty
shillings to stay in it. Even the dullest man
has now become convinced that women can
earn money, so that we hope that in time even
the most penurious husband will perceive the
wisdom of giving his wife an allowance, and
that *s all we Ve been after; and yet we have
to make all this fuss to get it. If Adam were
only a little easier to move, he would save us
and himself a great deal of pushing.
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The Joys of Being a Woman

Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our
economic one. We mean only to wake you
to the use of the ballot in your hands, when
we ask you to give it to our hands. Already
we have aroused you to two facts: if politics
is too soiled a spot for your women to enter,
then it is too soiled a spot for our men to
enter, and therefore it is high time you did a
little scrubbing; and also that if you refuse
to enlarge the suffrage to admit desirable
women, it is high time to consent to restrict
it so as not to admit undesirable men. Again
this is all we have been after, but again we
have had to make a great deal of noise in
order to wake you up.

But feminism to the male mind suggests
not only commercial and professional and
political careers for women, but something
less tangible and more terrible, the advent
of a bugaboo called the New Woman, who
shall devastate The Home and happiness. It
is a strong argument for our superiority that
there is nothing that frightens a man so much
as a woman's threatening to become like him.
Yet the time has come for frightening him,
and we are doing it conscientiously, for, to
confess truth, there is nothing that frightens
a woman so much as becoming like a man.
However, for his soul's sake, she can manage

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The Joys of Being a Woman

to assume the externals of man's conduct, but
not^even for his soul's sake, much less her own,
would she ever adopt his mental or spiritual
equipment. Adam has such a tendency to
ennui that the only way to keep him really
comfortable is every now and then to make
him a little uncomfortable. He was so well
off in Eden, and consequently so dour and
dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever
but to remove him from The Home entirely
in order to save his character. We are hop-
ing that we women of the present shall not
be driven to such an extremity; for we know
what her exile meant for Eve! We are busily
fostering man's fear of losing The Home, as
the best way of making him appreciate it,
and so of preserving it for him, and for our-
selves.

As with The Home, so with the woman
called New. She never was, she never will be,
but to present her to man's future seems the
only way of making man satisfied with the
woman of the past. We have had to stir men
to appreciate us as women, by showing them
how easily we could be men if we would. The
creator granted to Adam's loneliness an Eve,
not another Adam, and should we at this late
day fail the purpose of our making, and cease
to be women? We have changed our manners
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The Joys of Being a Woman

and conversation a little, for the better suc-
cess of our scare, but the woman who sits
chuckling while she tends man's hearth and
him, is still as old-fashioned as Eve, and as
new.

Men, who always take themselves as seri-
ously as children, have been easy enough to
frighten by means of a feminism that seems
to take itself seriously. A really penetrating
man might guess that when women seem to
be so much in earnest, they must be up to
something quite different from their seeming,
and he might safely divine that, however
novel woman's purposes may appear to be,
they will always be explicable in the light
of her oldest purpose — man's improvement.
Now man's improvement is a heavy task, and
when nature entrusted it to woman, she gave
her a compensating advantage. To become
a genuine feminist, a woman would have to
forego her most enviable possession — her
sense of humor. Man can laugh, of course,
noisily enough; but what man possesses the
gift and the grace of seeing himself as a joke?
Men who must do the work of the world are
better off without humor, because they can
thus more easily keep their eyes on the road,
just as a horse needs blinders; but woman,

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The Joys of Being a Woman

who directs the work of man, needs to have
her eyes everywhere at once. By another fig-
ure, such rudimentary humor as man does
have is merely an external armor against cir-
cumstance; but woman's humor is permeat-
ing, her armor is all through her system, as if
her sinews were wrought of steel and sun-
beams. A man never wishes to be a woman?
Is it not an argument for the joys of being a
woman, that no man seems to have had such
fun in being a man that it has occurred to him
to write an essay on the subject?

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<tA Man in the House

THERE persists much of the harem in
every well-regulated home. In every
house arranged to make a real man really
happy, that man remains always a visitor,
welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest.
He steps in from the great outside for rest
and refreshment, but he never belongs. For
him the click and hum of the harem ma-
chinery stops, giving way to love and laugh-
ter, but there is always feminine relief when
the master departs and the household hum
goes on again. The anomaly lies in the fact
that in theory all the machinery exists but
for the master's comfort; but in practice, it is
much easier to arrange for his comfort when
he is not there. A house without a man is
savorless, yet a man in a house is incarnate
interruption. No matter how closely he in-
carcerates himself, or how silently, a woman
always feels him there. He may hide beyond
five doors and two flights of stairs, but his
presence somehow leaks through, and uncon-
sciously dominates every domestic detail. He

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dA Man in the House

does not mean to, the woman does not mean
him to; it is merely the nature of him. Keep
a man at home during the working hours of
the day, and there is a blight on that house,
not obvious, but subtle, touching the mood
and the manner of maidservant and man-
servant, cat, dog, and mistress, and affecting
even the behavior of inanimate objects, so
that there is a constraint about the sewing-
machine, a palsy on the vacuum-cleaner, and
a gaucherie in the stove-lids. Over the whole
household spreads a feeling of the unnatural,
and a resulting sense of ineffectuality. Let
the man go out, and with the closing of the
front door, the wheels grow brisk again, and
smooth. To enjoy a home worth enjoying, a
man should be in it as briefly as possible.

By nature man belongs to the hunt in the
open, and woman to the fire indoors, and just
here lies one of the best reasons for being a
woman rather than a man, because a woman
can get along without a man's out-of-doors
much better than a man can get along without
a woman's indoors, which proves woman of
the two the better bachelor, as being more
self-contained and self-contented. Every real
man when abroad on the hunt is always dream-
ing of a hearth and a hob and a wife, whereas
no real woman, if she has the hearth and the
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<zA Man in the House

hob, is longing for man's hunting spear or
quarry. If she is indeed a real woman she is
very likely longing to give a man the comfort
of the fire, provided he will not stay too long
at a stretch, but get out long enough to give
her time to brush up his hearth and rinse his
teapot satisfactorily to herself.

A man's home-coming is not an end in it-
self, its objective is the woman; but a wom-
an's home-making exists both for the man
and for itself. A woman needs to be alone
with her house because she talks to it, and in
a tongue really more natural than her talk
with her husband, which is always better for
having a little the company flavor, as in the
seraglio. The most devoted wives are often
those frankest in their abhorrence of a man in
the house. It is because they do not like to
keep their hearts working at high pressure too
long at a time; they prefer the healthy relief
of a glorious day of sorting or shopping be-
tween the master's breakfast and his dinner.

It is a rare menage that is not incommoded
by having its males lunch at home. It is much
better when a woman may watch their dear
coat-tails round the corner for the day, with
an equal exaltation in their freedom for the
fray and her own. A woman whose males
have their places of. business neither on the

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dA Man in the House

great waters nor in the great streets, but in
their own house, is of all women the most
perpetually pitied by other women, and the
most pathetically patient. She never looks
quite like other women, this doctor's, minis-
ter's, professor's, writer's wife. Her eyes have
a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting
sweetness, for she does not belong to her
house, and so she does not belong to herself.
When a man's business-making and a wom-
an's home-making live under the same roof,
they never go along in parallel independence:
always the man's overlaps, invades. Kitchen
and nursery are hushed before the needs of of-
fice and study, and the professional telephone
call postpones the orders to the butcher. The
home suffers, but the husband suffers more,
for he is no longer a guest in his own house,
with all a guest's prerogatives; he now belongs
there, and must take the consequences.

Fortunately the professional men-about-
the-house are in small minority, and so are
their housekeepers, but all women have some-
times to experience the upheaval incident on
a man's vacation at home; whether father's,
or husband's, or college brother's, or son's,
the effect is always the same: the house stands
on its head, and for two days it kicks up its
heels and enjoys it, but after two weeks, two
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&A Man in the House

months, that is, on the removal of the excit-
ing stimulus, it sinks to coma for the rest of
the season. The different professions differ
in their treatment of a holiday, except that all
men at home on a vacation act like fish on
land or cats in water, and expect their women-
folk either to help them pant, or help them
swim. They seem to go out a great deal, —
at least they are always clamoring to have
their garments prepared for sorties, social or
piscatorial, — and yet they always seem to
be under heel. Some men on a home holiday
tinker all day long, others bring with them a
great many books which they never read, and
the result in both cases is that housekeeping
becomes a prolonged picking up. All men at
home on a vacation eat a great deal more than
other men, or than at other times; but with
the sole exception of the anomalous academic,
who is always concerned for his gastronomy,
they will eat anything and enjoy it, — and
say so. A man at home for his holidays is al-
ways vociferously appreciative. His happi-
ness is almost enough to repay a woman for
the noise he makes, and the mess; yet statis-
tics would show that during any man's home
vacation the women of the house lose just
about as many pounds as the man gainst But
what are women for, or homes?

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<±A Man in the Home

After all 9 you can have a house without a
man in it if you are quite sure you want to,
but you cannot have a home without one.
You cannot make a home out of women alone,
or men alone; you have to mix them. Still
every woman must admit, and every man
with as much sense as a woman, that it *s very
hard to make a home for any man if he is al-
ways in it. Every honest front door must
confess that it is glad to see its master go
forth in the morning; but this is only because
it is so much gladder to see him come back at
night.

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Ill

Old-Clothes Sensations

PEOPLE whom penury has never com-
pelled in infancy or adolescence [to wear
other people's clothes have missed a valu-
able lesson in social sympathy. In our jour-
ney from the period when we first strutted
thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles's cast-
off coat on to the time when we resented its
misfit, and thence to that latest and best day
when we could bestow our own discarded
jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have
successively experienced all the gradations
of soul between pauper and philanthropist.
Most of us are fortunate enough to put away
other people's clothes when we put away the
rest of childhood's indignities; but our early
experiences should make us thoughtful of
those who have no such luck, who seem or-
dained from birth to be all the world's poor
relations. In gift-clothes there is something
peculiarly heart-searching both for giver and
recipient.

This delicacy inherent in the present of cast-
off suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle

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>Old-Clothes Sensations

clinging of the giver's self to the serge or silk.
It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in
another man's old coat. If an individuality is
fine enough to be worth retaining, it is likely
to be fine enough to disappear utterly be-
neath the weight of another man's shoulders
upon one's own. Most of us would rather have
our creeds chosen for us than our clothes.
Most of us would rather select our own tatters
than have another's cast-off splendors thrust
upon us. It is no light achievement, the living
up to and into other people's clothes. Clothes
acquire so much personality from their first
wearer, — adjust themselves to the swell of
the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in
the hip-joint, — that the first wearer always
wears them, no matter how many times they
may be given away. He is always felt to be
inside, so that the second wearer's ego is con-
stantly bruised by the pressure resulting from
two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat.
Middle children are to be pitied for being
condemned to be constantly made over out
of the luckier eldest's outgrown raiment. How
can Tommy be sure he is Tommy, when he is
always walking around in Johnny's shoes?
Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own
heart, when all her life it has beaten under
Anna's pinafore?
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The evil is still worse when the garments
come from outside the family, for one may
readily accept from blood-kin bounty which,
bestowed by a stranger, would arouse a cor-
roding resentment. This is because one can
always revenge one's self on one's relatives
for an abasement of gratitude by means of
self-respecting kicks and pinches. A grow-
ing soul may safely wear his big brother's
ulster, but no one else's; for there are germs
in other people's clothes, — the big bad yel-
low bacilli of covetousness. People give you
their old clothes because they have ne w <jnp» ?
and th is fact is hard to forg ive.

There may, of course, exist mitigating cir-
cumstances that often serve to solace or re-
move this basic resentment. To receive gown
or hat or boots direct from the donor is de-
grading, but in proportion as they come to us
through a lengthening chain of transferring
hands the indignity fades out, the previous
wearer's personality becomes less insistent;
until, when identification is an impossibility,
we may even take pleasure in conjecturing
who may have previously occupied our pock-
ets, may even feel the pull of real friendliness
toward the unknown heart that beat beneath
the warm woolen bosom presented to us.

Further, the potential bitterness of the

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Old-Clothes Sensations

recipient is dependent on the stage of his
racial development and the color of his skin.
The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new.
The black cook would rather have her mis-
tress's cast-off frock than a new one, and the
cook is therein canny. She trusts the correct-
ness of the costume that her lady has chosen
for herself, but distrusts the selection the
lady might make for her maid. On assuming
the white woman's clothes, the black woman
feels that she succeeds also to the white wom-
an's dignity. The duskier race stands at the
same point of evolution with the child who
falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who
straightway struts about therein without
thought of his own discarded independence.
I may be perceived to write from the point
of view of one clothed in childhood out of the
missionary box. Those first old clothes re-
ceived were donned with gloating and glory;
but later, in my teens, — that period so
strangely composed for all of us out of spirit-
ual shabbiness and spiritual splendor, — sen-
sations toward the cast-off became uneasy, un-
comfortable, at last unbearable. The sprout-
ing personality resisted the impact of that
other personality who had first worn my gar-
ments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at
first, then fiercely.
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Old-Clothes Sensations

No one who has passed from a previous
condition of servitude to the dignity of his
own earnings will ever forget the pride of his
first self-bought clothes. At last one is one's
self and belongs not to another man's coat,
or another woman's gown. It is a period of
expansion, of pride: when one's clothes are
altogether one's own, one's pauper days are
done. But it is best for sympathy not to for-
get them, not only for the sake of the pauper,
but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the
verge of becoming; for our sensations in re-
gard to old clothes are about to enter a new
phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of
being ourselves the donors of our own old
clothes.

It was not alone for the new coat's intrinsic
sake that we desired it; we coveted still more
the experience of giving it away when we were
done with it. There is no more soul-warming
sensation than that of giving away something
that you no longer want. The pain of a recip-
ient's feelings on receiving a thing which you
can afford to give away, but which he him-
self cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced
by your pride in presenting him with some-
thing that you can't use.

The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit
is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical

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Old-Clothes Sensations

philanthropy, but veracious ps ychology. It
follows that the Best way to restore a pau-
per's self-respect is to present him with some
old clothes to give to some one still poorer;
for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test
of character. It was the custom of epics to
represent the king as bestowing upon his
guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were
never old clothes. If you could picture some
Homeric monarch in the act of giving away
his worn-out raiment, in that moment you
would see his kingliness dwindle.

The man who can receive another man's
old clothes without thereby losing his self-
respect is fit to be a prince among paupers,
but the man who can give another man his
old clothes without wounding that man's self-
respect is fit to be thejring of all philant hro-
pists.

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Luggage and the Lady

I WRITE as one pursued through life by
the malevolence of inanimate objects.
My singular subjection to things was never
brought so painfully home to me as during
four months in Europe. Of course, my soul
had been to Europe a great many times, but
my body never, and now I was taking it, as
well as certain scrip and scrippage for its
journey. I chained up my soul and held it
under lock and key while I took counsel with
certain seductive guidebooks. These paternal
manuals left no detail untouched, until there
was no fear left for me of cabs or custom-
houses, of money-tables or time-tables. It
was all as simple as bread and milk. One thing
all my guides inveighed against, a superfluity
of baggage; with them I utterly agreed. A
trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign rail-
ways: there stood ready always an army of
porters to escort one's handbags. A lady
could travel gayly with a single change of
raiment; after a day's dust and soil, merely
the transformation of a blouse, and behold

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Luggage and the Lady

a toilet fit for any table d'hote. Moreover,
so remarkable were foreign laundry facilities
that on tumbling to bed all you had to do was
to summon an obliging maid, deliver, sleep,
and on the morrow morn, behold yourself
all crisply washed and ironed. As to the ex-
pense of a trunk and the battalions of porters,
the guidebooks were correct; as to the rest,
they lied. The single blouse theory is all very
well if you don't wear out or tear out by the
way; and as to the laundry fallacy, do I not
still see myself roaming the streets of Ant-
werp searching vainly for one single blan-
chisserie ? My conclusion is that one needs
clothes and a right mind about as much on
one side of the Atlantic as on the other.

But I had not reached this conclusion when
I bought my baggage, therefore I limited my-
self to two hand-pieces. For the first of these
I had not far to search. It was that frail,
slim, dapper thing, a straw suitcase. It was
very light, just how light I was afterwards to
discover, but before embarkation I regarded
it with joy; it seemed to me suitable and gen-
teel, with its sober gray sides and trim leather
corners. With it I was satisfied, whereas from
the first I felt misgiving about my second arti-
cle of impedimenta. There was nothing gen-
teel or ladylike about this, that was certain,
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but perhaps I am not the first traveler who
has yielded to the mendacious promises of a
telescope. It looks as if it would so obligingly
yield to the need either of condensation or
expansion. You may inflate or contract at
will, and it's all the same to the telescope.
My telescope was peculiarly unbeautiful. Its
material was a shiny substance looking like
linoleum, called wood fiber, and having a
bright burnt-orange color. Its corners were
strengthened with sheet iron, lacquered black.
You have seen the same in use by rural drum-
mers, but rarely in a female hand. I don't
know why I bought it. It is part of my quarrel
with inanimate objects that they always
exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the
shop, and always excite loathing so soon as
they arrive at my home. In this instance it
was both the saleswoman and the purchase
that excited the hypnotism. She was of that
florid, expansive, pompadoured type that al-
ways reduces my mind to feebleness. More-
over, she jumped up and down on my pros-
pective telescope, bouncing before my eyes
in all her bigness. Now, in my sober senses I
do know that one's primary motive in pur-
chasing a handbag is not that one may dance
upon it; but at that moment, as I watched her
pirouetting as if on a springboard, I felt that

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Luggage and the Lady

no piece of luggage was anything worth unless
you could jump upon it. I bought.

Almost at once that tawny bedemoned box
began its career of naughtiness. The first
thing it did on shipboard was to disappear. It
stopped just long enough to be entered in the
agent's book, and then it leaped down into the
hold and hid. I searched; the purser searched;
so did six several stewards and stewardesses.
The stewards searched the staterooms; I
searched the passages; together we searched
the hold, penetrating even the steerage to see
if the missing article were congregating with
the motley collection down there. We were
four days out when, in a passage repeatedly
searched, on a ledge near a porthole, behold
my tawny telescope leering at me! My stew-
ard was genuinely superstitious over it. So
was I.

It was during my first travels on land that
I discovered that a capacity for being jumped
upon, far from being a recommendation in a
piece of luggage, is distinctly a detraction.
I did a great deal of jumping during three
weeks in Scotland. I am sure I shall have sym-
pathizers when I declare my difficulties in
packing a telescope. In the first place, it is
very hard, when both ends are lying on the
floor, supine and gaping, to distinguish which
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Luggage and the Lady

is top and which is bottom. It is only after
sad repacking that you discover that while
top will sometimes go over bottom, bottom
will never go over top. Having ascertained
which is bottom, you begin to pack. You soon
are even with the edge; but in a telescope this
is nothing. You continue to pack, up, up into
the air, a tremulous mountain of garments
upon which at length you gingerly place top.
Firmly seating yourself at one end, you grasp
the straps that girdle the other, and bravely
you seek to buckle them. Result, while that
end of the telescope on which you are sitting
undoubtedly settles under your weight, from
the gaping mouth which you are attempting
to muzzle there is belched forth an array of
petticoats, blouses, collars, postcards. You
dismount, reopen, replace scattered articles,
and reseat yourself on the opposite end. Re-
sult, the end which sank under you before
now pops wide, and spouts forth a stream of
Baedekers red as collops. Again you repack
all, replace top. Starting from across the
room, with a running high jump, you aim to
land on the very middle of the thing. Result,
the top goes down, it is true, but from all
edges there dips a fringe of garments. In the
privacy of your room, with the assistance of
Heaven and the chambermaid and the Boots,

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you may sometimes contrive to shut a tele-
scope; but I once had to open and restrap
mine, sole and unaided, in the waiting room of
a station. It happened that I had placed my
ticket to London in the toe of one shoe,
placed the shoe in the bottom of the straw
suitcase, locked this, placed the key in the toe
of the other shoe, and placed that in the bot-
tom of my telescope. Why did I do this?
Simply because I had just visited Melrose
Abbey. I frequently suffer from a tendency
of my costume to disruption in moments of
stress. At times of great muscular exertion
and mental excitement my hat tends to take
an inebriate lunge, each several hairpin stands
on end, my collar rises rowdyish from its
moorings, impeccable glove fingers gape wan-
tonly. All these circumstances attended the
closing of my telescope on that occasion. It
was immediately after that I decided upon
the necessity of a third piece of baggage.

I bought it in Edinburgh, on Princes
Street, the wonderful street where you vainly
seek to apply yourself to mundane shopping
with Edinburgh Castle ever filling your vision,
standing over there on its craggy hill, all misty
with legend, while a hundred memories of
Mary Queen of Scots come whispering at your
ear as you soberly endeavor to buy gloves. If
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my previous impedimenta had been out-
rageously American, my third handbag was
Scotch, every inch of him. He was gentle-
manly and distinguished, frank and accom-
modating. I have never seen anything like
him over here, — shiny black sides of oil-
cloth, bound by leather strips, plentifully
studded with tacks, but otherwise strictly
unornamented. But his chief charm was the
way he opened, the whole top flapping easily
apart at will, and afterwards the two sides
closing over all as easily as if his only desire
were to please. In capacity he was unlimited;
you could pour into him, on and on, and al-
ways he closed upon his contents smilingly,
without protest.

For a brief space, as \ trickled down through
England from cathedral to cathedral, my
Scotch companion was my chiefest comfort,
the mere sight of his black, rising-sunshiny
face cheering me as it looked down upon me
from the luggage rack of a third-class carriage.
More and more I came to impose upon the
generosity of his interior, until one day my
confidence in his Scotch integrity was rudely
shattered; for I discovered that the reason he
could hold so much was that he had quietly
kicked out his bottom! He continued to ac-
company me, it is true, but thrust from

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his high gentlemanly estate, resembling now
rather those bleary, dilapidated Glasgow por-
ters that greet one's arriving vessel, his frail
form, like theirs, begirt and bandaged in or-
der to support the few light belongings I now
dared to entrust to his feebleness.

Meanwhile, the strength of my yellow tele-
scope continued unabated, but so did also its
averseness to accommodating my possessions,
which daily, all unwittingly and unwillingly,
increased. My dapper suitcase had suffered
by the way, its neat sides were bruised and
staved in, one leather corner was missing,
another stood up like an attentive ear. It
still smiled, "brave in ragged luck," but its
own America would not have known it. It
now appeared that England, and as it hap-
pened, rural Devon, must contribute another
article to my retinue.

Now, ever since I had touched Great Brit-
ain, my unaccustomed eye had been fasci-
nated by a piece of luggage quite new to me.
I mean that most British thing, the tin trunk.
We have nothing like it in luggage, but we
have copied it exactly in cake boxes; the only
difference is that the English original has a
bulge top and a lock and key. In character
my British baggage was much better natured
than my American telescope, but in color it
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was much the same, orange tawny; it had
grown very easy for me to spot my belongings
in the miscellany of the luggage van.

These representatives of the American,
Scotch, and English nations followed in my
wake from Southampton to St. Malo, and
perhaps their company need never have been
increased on the continent if in Brittany I had
not bought a pair of sabots, life size. Noth-
ing so unaccommodating as sabots ! Seemingly
each was big enough to sleep in, but if I at-
tempted 'to pack the inside of one, behold, it
would hold nothing at all; it was built to hold
a foot, and if it could n't have a foot, it would
have nothing. In true peasant insolence, each
sabot demanded a whole handbag to itself,
and, once in, refused to accommodate its sub-
stantial bulk to the needs of any of my other
possessions. In much difficulty I managed to
get across France, but once in Paris, espe-
cially in view of certain aristocratic pur-
chases that absolutely refused to consort with
wooden shoes, the need of still a fifth hand-
piece was evident.

Paris luggage, like a Paris lady, is built to
show a pleasing exterior. Diversion rather
than utility is its motive. My Paris hand-
bag still preserves its suggestion of perpetual
picnic. It looks as if it were always just off

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for a Sunday in the Bois. It is a woven wicker
thing, exactly like an American lunch-basket,
vastly magnified. The handle must be grasped
from the top, and is not the handy side ap-
pendage of all American grips. I never look
at it without seeing within dozens upon
dozens of boiled eggs and sandwiches. As a
matter of fact, it has never held anything of
the sort; rather it carried my new Parisian
costume safely from Paris to New York.

By dint of fast and furious touring through
Belgium I managed not to acquire anything
more to pack or to be packed, but in Holland
once again I fell. I was within a few days of
sailing when I visited Alkmaar. There a tall
polyglot young Dutchman showed me through
a most delicious cheese factory. Innocent and
round, ruby or orange, smiled those cheeses
down at me from their long shelves. My
guide gave me to eat. Thus it was that the
last thing I bought on the other side was —
cheeses! Oh, he assured me, they were per-
fectly well behaved; even had they so desired
they could not get out of their strong cases;
no more innocent gift to be taken home* to
appreciative friends. That Dutchman un-
derstood American credulity better than he
did the American language. Those cheeses
did not stay in their cases. They came out
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and performed in all ways after the manner
of cheeses. Now throughout my trip, what-
ever inconveniences I might suffer by reason
of possessions acquired, I could never make
up my mind to abandon any. Having bought
them, I did not desert my cheeses, but it be-
came increasingly apparent that they would
have to travel in a home of their own, to-
gether with such of my goods as would not
be corrupted by evil communications. I pur-
chased my last bit of luggage in Rotterdam.
It was a gray canvas bag, in shape like a
dachshund without the appendages. It was
capable of as much lateral expansion as a
Marken fisherman. It received and held the
cheeses, but frankly, so that their contour was
clear to the eye. To all appearances I was
taking home a bushel of turnips out of brave
little Holland.

I embarked at Rotterdam, and for ten days
sank into that state of coma to which ocean
travel stimulates me. It was not till we had
touched the Hoboken dock that I became
once more acutely alert. I had donned my
Paris traveling dress, had walked through the
great shed until I found my letter X, and then
turned about to wait with the rest for the ar-
rival of my luggage. Then for the first time
realization overwhelmed me. I was waiting

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for my bags, my bags; those six disreputable
traveling companions would here and now
seek me out and claim my society, right here
in America, with V and W to right of me, Y
and Z to left, my haughty steamer acquaint-
ance, looking on! Over on the other side one is
not known by one's baggage, but here one is !
I had faced many a white continental porter
with nonchalance, but with which one of my
motley collection in my hand could I face the
black Pullman porter of my own country? I
cowered with shame, so slowly they arrived,
each several one of the six, tediously thread-
ing its way to X, never losing itself, never
losing me, always hunting me down! The joy
of home-coming was turned to gall. I saw V
and W, Y and Z, turn away their faces. To
my eyes each several hand-piece looked more
bizarre than the last. Which one should I
select to accompany me on an American rail-
road? Which of the motley crew would least
endanger the respectability of a lady travel-
ing alone in an American car? Through the
crowd my Parisian lunch-basket came minc-
ing up to me, still ready for perpetual picnic.
Silly chit! I wouldn't travel with her. My
Rotterdam purchase, bulging and redolent
with cheeses, came waddling up, respectable
perhaps, but with it I should have been as
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conspicuous as with one of the Marken imps
in copious trousers that it so much resembled.
My former pride of Scotch travel was now so
fallen away that he looked as if he were in the
last stages of his native whiskey, and as if his
physique would hardly have supported the
weight of a hairpin. No help to be had in him !
My American suitcase, in May so trig and
debonair, had been punched and pounded out
of all semblance to anything belonging either
to America or a suitcase. My British cake-
box had suffered likewise, and in its decrepi-
tude supported the loss of a lock, and ap-
peared to my horrified eyes carefully roped
with clothesline by a friendly steward. Even
though I promptly sat down upon it, spread-
ing my Paris skirt wide, I could not conceal
that yellow cake-box from the fashionable
steamer folk that swarmed about me. Suit-
case and tin trunk both had lost all distinc-
tion of nation; they both belonged now to the
international species, tramp. There remained
to me only my evil genius, the orange-tawny
telescope. Foreign labels had but scantily
subdued the natural aggressiveness of his de-
meanor. He was possible — perhaps. Then
I considered how he had flouted me, scorned
me, spilled out at me, jeered at me in my
helplessness. I pictured opening and shutting

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him in the berth of a sleeping car; then quietly,
inconspicuously, and virulently, I kicked him.
I fastened the last strap the customs officers
had loosened. Just one moment I hesitated,
regarding my rakish European retinue, then
I fell upon the waiting baggage-agent. " Check
them all," I cried, "all! " Free as a bird, as a
gypsy, as an American, I traveled from New
York to Chicago, a lady luggage-less.

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V
'Detached Thoughts on Boarding

BOARDING is a puzzling and provoca-
tive subject for any student of human
nature. Some clue to its psychology is re-
vealed by the fact that even Adam and Eve
got tired of it, Eden itself could not keep
them from wanting their own menage. One
can conjecture the course of their growing
ennui and irritation as the suspicion dawned
upon them that in Paradise they were not
getting all the comforts of home. Having
. nothing to do but board, they probably con-
versed a great deal about their food, when
the celestial ministrants were out of earshot,
and eventually decided that they could have
run the table a great deal better themselves.
Then, too, they had no privacy, they were
absolutely at the mercy of any archangel
who might choose to drop in on them. Pos-
sibly, also, Eve felt that Eden was no sort
of place for bringing up children. They
might be spoiled by the attentions of other
boarders, elephant or ape, fish or fowl, any
one of a perfectly indiscriminate menagerie,

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'Detached Thoughts on Boarding

while she herself, as a mother, might be sub-
jected to constant advice from angels who
did not know. one thing more about human
babies than she did herself. After Eve had
thought over these matters for some time,
and whispered them all to Adam, she did
what many another boarder has done since;
she up and precipitated a crisis.

The case of Adam and Eve is sufficiently
typical to afford some light upon the puzzling
effects of boarding, but not quite enough il-
lumination to satisfy the psychologist. He is
teased by the conviction that there is more
in this matter than he can get at. Without
an ultimate analysis of causes it may still be
of interest to examine some results to the
human spirit of both the selling and the buy-
ing of house-room, and to offer some tenta-
tive explanation of the curious phenomena
that for many of us are too familiar for atten-
tion.

We all recognize as a distinct human type
the woman who keeps boarders. One writes
woman rather than man, not that in strict
accuracy one could say that men never keep
boarders; when men do engage in the busi-
ness, however, they do so by wholesale, never
by retail, while it is precisely the increased
personal intimacy of the retail relation that
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occasions the peculiar blight incurred by the
proprietor of a boarding-house, but escaped
by the proprietor of a hotel. There is an ex-
pression familiar to our tongues, distressing
in its figurative suggestion, which is fre-
qnently descriptive of the class under dis-
cussion, " decayed gentlewoman." No one
knows whether a gentlewoman takes boarders
because she has decayed or whether she de-
cays because she takes them. Of course, not
all women who take boarders are decrepit
either in soul or body, — some of them are
very buxom indeed; and, equally, not all are
refined, — some of them are refreshingly vul-
gar; still, as a whole, the attributes inherent
in the term " decayed gentlewoman " so gen-
erally characterize the profession that in
whatever country one travels one is received
by ladies so consciously redolent of better
days as to shame a boarder for not having
had better days himself. However adroitly
they conceal their emotions, women who
entertain paying guests generally have to-
ward their occupation a feeling of perpetual
apology or of perpetual resentment. Some-
times the apology element predominates, and
then a blundering boarder had better be
mindful of the sensitive toes of his hostess;
sometimes the resentment is uppermost, and

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then the boarder had better be mindful for
his own toes. There is no reason why these
facts should characterize so worthy a busi-
ness, and there are conspicuous exceptions
in which both the woman and the domicile
remain invincibly warm-hearted and wel-
coming, but the rule still holds that only the
rarest of women can invite the public into
her home and not herself suffer from the ex-
posure, only the rarest of women can as the
mistress of a boarding-house still be perfectly
herself.

Having boarders, however, is not so de-
moralizing as being a boarder. The chronic
boarder is an easily recognizable type, fat,
fussy, futHe, and usually feminine. This
caustic characterization does not apply to
women who go out by the day to any form
of scrubbing, as doctors, lawyers, or what-
not, professional women too busy for carping;
it is the woman who has no profession except
boarding that suffers its utmost injury. To
give primary attention to the manner in
which one is fed and lodged has the same
effect as any other reversion to an animal
attitude. The faces of women who do noth-
ing but keep house are always harassed; the
faces of women who do nothing but board are
always vacuous. Men-boarders in a house are
5*

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'Detached Thoughts on Boarding

generally preferred to women; a he-boarder
is more to be desired than a she-boarder
because there is less of him underfoot. On
the other hand, since a man can always beat
a woman on her own ground whenever he
thinks it worth while, a man who gives his
undivided attention to his boarding can in
fume and fuss out-boarder any woman.

The insidious influence of boarding upon
the spirit is most evident when we watch
it operate upon a child. We all know the
type of youngster that even the very best
of boarding-houses is prone to produce. He
is noisy, aggressive, self-conscious, and yet to
sympathetic penetration profoundly pathetic.
He knows that all his little life is overheard,
that every room knows when he is scolded
or spanked or entreated. A grown-up learns
how to conceal his soul from even boarding-
house scrutiny, but a child has no refuge ex-
cept in slamming doors and thundering on
the stairs and jumping into the secrets of
those who have trespassed upon his own.

The effect of boarding upon our own. soul
may best be seen by contrasting our reac-
tions to our geography, according as we wake
in the morning to find ourselves at home, in
a friend's home, or in a boarding-house. At
home our attitude toward the ensuing day is

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one of absolute sincerity, — we expect to be
our best self or our worst, for frankness is
the chief comfort of kinship; if, on the other
hand, we open our eyes in somebody's guest
chamber, we marshal our forces to insure our
good behavior, we owe it to our host to put
out best foot foremost; but if we wake in a
boarding-house? There our morning resolve
reduces itself to the single sordid intention
to get our money's worth. This latent hos-
tility is ignominious and unworthy, but it is
true- Yet we all know that any hostelry is
richer in Samaritan opportunities than the
road to Jericho.

The detriment due to boarding does not
confine itself to animate beings, but extends
to the inanimate. In a boarding-house even
the chairs look protesting and sat upon. The
curtains seem exhausted by enforced wel-
come. The overworked kitchen has not
enough pride left to keep its savors to itself.
The piano has clattered until it has forgotten
it was ever meant for music. The doom of
dejection falls upon a boarding-house both
without and within, so that one always re-
grets its entrance into a street cozy with
homes. Its windows stare forth so blankly
that the homes grow uncomfortable and move
away. There is a blur over the face-walls of
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a boarding-place obliterating the individual-
ity to which every house has a right.

This very absence of personality gives the
boarding-house a certain personality of its
own. The effort to analyze this character
has made the boarding-house a favorite back-
ground with story-writers. Balzac, in "Pere
Goriot," caught and reproduced its very soul
as well as the soul of the homeless home-lover
that it harbored. The frequency of the hall
bedroom and the long table in magazine
stories to-day suggests the wistful familiarity
with both of writer and reader. The juxta-
position of types in a group bound together
by no more congenial tie than the brute need
of food and shelter has always opened a fas-
cinating field to the romancer from Chaucer's
day to ours.

The mere mention of Chaucer's name is
eloquent with contrast, for surely the Tabard
was no bleak spot, but warm and tingling with
hospitality. Yet even Chaucer's blithe com-
pany had a sharp eye and a gossipy tongue
ready for each other's, foibles, and if they had
remained together too long, it would have
taken more than mine host to keep them in
order, but fortunately they had their picnic
and parted. Another week or two and even
the Canterbury pilgrims might have degen-

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erated into boarders, and dear knows what
metamorphosis mine host the merry, might
have undergone.

To place Balzac's boarding-house and
Chaucer's Tabard side by side is to produce
a pregnant contrast. Yet if the primary pur-
pose of both is akini, why the world of differ-
ence connoted by the word "boarding-house"
and the world "inn"? Inn suggests comfort,
coziness, congenial conversation, but, alas, it
also suggests a dear departed day. The only
inns left are survivors from dead decades,
and they themselves have no descendants.
"Mine ease in mine inn" is a phrase from the
past.

It is interesting to examine the difference
in meaning of the three types of hostelry —
hotel, boarding-house, and inn. The hotel
does not try to be something it is not. It
neither offers nor expects anything personal.
Its purpose is to make money out of the visi-
tor, as his purpose is to get comfort out of it.
A hotel is not a home, and it does not pretend
to be. Now a boarding-house is pathetic be-
cause it is always trying to be a home when it
is not. It is we, the boarders, who are respon-
sible for its being the wistful anomaly that it
is, for at one moment we demand of it the in-
difference of a hotel and the next the coziness
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of a home, and at all moments we ask of it
that which money cannot buy — hospitality.
The little word inn stands apart from those
other two, hotel and bokrding-house, and its
charm lies as much in its literary aroma as its
actuality. We visit inns oftener in books than
in life, but in both they have the same char-
acteristics. The tiniest inn is always big
enough for personality. The innkeeper is a
person, the guest is a person, the cook, the
boots, the hostler, they are all real persons.
There is time for flavoring food with conversa-
tion. The chairs are friendly and inviting.
The hearth leaps warm with welcome. But
note well, one sometimes lives at a hotel, one
often lives at a boarding-house, but one never
lives at an inn, one merely stops. The reason
why the welcome and the speeding of an inn
can be so warm and genuine is that host and
guest never have too much of each other. Both
can present their best foot for three days when
a stretch of three weeks would strain its ten-
dons. In an inn food never seems skimped, the
financial aspect never seems prominent, be-
cause the guest never stays long enough to
discover sordid secrets, nor long enough to
have his own private affairs invaded. Com-
pany manners, the outward and visible sign
of hospitality's inward and spiritual grace, can

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prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that
no matter how often one returns, exactly as
often one departs.

It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects
of boarding upon human nature than to ascer-
tain the psychological causes underlying them.
One ventures to hazard a few random reasons,
all interrelated and all growing out of the
fact that we are still cave-dwellers at heart.
The cave household feared and hate4 the
stranger; and with good cause. They eyed
him askance, exactly as the other boarders in
a house eye the recent comer. The newest
boarder never coalesces with the group until
the advent of another still newer, when he is
tentatively admitted to ranks needing union
against the latest intruder. This survival of
prehistoric manners may be observed and
experienced in any boarding-house.

The hostility of older occupants toward the
stranger is exactly matched by his suspicion
of them, hostile suspicion always, no matter
how obsequiously concealed. When a cave-
dweller penetrated the seclusion of another
cave, he was wary, on the defensive, and this
attitude made him critical of the inmates, of
course, and therefore, for them, a person to
fear. We are still afraid of the stranger, of his
eye that may see, and his tongue that may
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^Detached Thoughts on Boarding

tell, our secrets. Boarding hurts us because
we suffer continual abrasion of our reserve.
In a boarding-house, family life has to go on
in whispers; strangers are in our midst look-
ing and listening, and even if they are friendly
their attention is irksome: Eve got tired of
having even the angels around all the time.

The human soul demands retirement, but
is often unwilling to pay the price. Home-
making is to be had only by house-keeping.
In order to live by ourselves we have to take
care of ourselves, and the effort to evade this
issue drives us to the boarding-house. The
home-keeping instinct is, however, as active
in us as in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only
they knew better than to try to suppress it.
They knew they wanted seclusion, and so they
rolled a rock to the cave-mouth, and possessed
their souls in privacy. It is our doom to in-
herit from them a desire for our own front
door, in order that we may not have to sue for
entrance at some one else's door, and also
that we may never have to open ours except
when we do so in free and voluntary welcome.
Boarding is often necessary, but it goes con-
trary to impulses as ineradicable in us as nest-
making in a bird. Even the feminists, when
they inveigh against family life, will be found
not free from prehistoric impulses toward

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privacy. They do nc>t advocate caravansary
existence, but rather the group system, in all
its cave-dweller isolation; only the group must
be based on congeniality, not on mere arbi-
trary and accidental kinship.

The joy of slamming our own front door
upon the world is only equaled by the joy of
flinging that door wide to the world when we
wish to. Of all commodities hospitality should
be free from money-taint. The trouble with
boarding is that it attempts to buy and sell
a welcome. Everything is cheapened the mo-
ment we can pay a price for it. The instant
we lay our dollars on the counter, we have
the right to criticize our purchase. A buyer
does not have to say thank you with his lips
nor yet with his heart, and this is why a
certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any
purely commercial relation. Hospitality is
essentially not sordid, but spiritual: a host is
gracious with the generosity that offers what
money cannot buy, a guest is gracious with
the gratitude that accepts what money can-
not pay for. Boarding is an anomalous and
enforced relation between people who offer
and accept house-room, and only those can
escape its blight who have the power always
to elevate the commercial to the plane of the
human and the friendly. Luckily, among this
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small but noble company are many persons
that board and many that take boarders. The
existence of this minority does not alter the
fact that for most of us boarding is a demoral-
izing occupation. The reason lies deep: hos-
pitality, given or received, is too sacred for
barter.

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The Lady Alone at Mght

I AM a lady, and a coward. The two facts
have no relation to each other, but both
are necessary to a comprehension of my sen-
timents about to be delivered. Soberly re-
volving the universe in my mind, I find only
one thing of which I am sure I am not afraid,
and that is — dying. I mean merest dying,
for I am as fearsome as any of being tossed in
air, disjecta membra, by an automobile; of
furnishing lingering sweetness to an epicurean
tiger; of being played with, and pawed and
tweaked by disease, cat-and-mouse-like; it is
only the actual slipping by the portal of which
I am not afraid. With this sole exception, I
am afraid of everything: firecrackers, reptiles,
drunken cooks, dogs, tunnels, trolleys, and
caterpillars. About ghosts I am a little un-
certain; experience leads me to conjecture
that ghosts are usually your own fault: that
is, they are a little like rattlesnakes; if you
don't intrude, neither will they. But that cir-
cumstance which is to me the very quintes-
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The Lady Alone at JVtght

sence of terror is Night and A Man. I speak
hypothetically — it has never happened.

Strange what a difference mere plurality of
a noun and mere presence or absence of an
article make to my mind. Now Men, Man,
and A Man stand for most diverse concep-
tions. Man, — I think of Mr. Alexander
Pope, and of a creature of watery intellect,
whose vitality is something between that of a
frog and a jumping-] ack, and who is diddled
puppet-wise by an equally anaemic deity.
Man is humanity dehumanized, but Men are
about the most human thing there is. Men
are the big people, clean-scrubbed spiritually
and physically, who come to see you and take
you about, and look after the universe, and
keep it in a good humor; who, when you are
making a fool of yourself, laugh at you in a
genial, masculine fashion. In a thin, tenta-
tive, feminine way, you try to imitate, and
the effort, however quavering, somehow makes
you feel better. Men, of your own family or
out of it, sometimes put you on trains, and
take care of you — sometimes. Thus Men.

But A Man — ugh! I saw him first in a
nightmare when I was six. He wore a black
Prince Albert, and on his head three high hats
jammed down one on top of the other. He
stood on the cone of a hill, black as a coal

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The Lady Alone at Night

against the red light of fires in the rear. From
under his three hats he grinned at me, and on
that black hill, against that lurid sky, he
danced and danced and danced. He fright-
ens me still. It is since then that Night and A
Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man
lurks in every darkened doorway, stretches an
arm from every tree trunk, pursues me, — pat,
pat, pat, — and fades into the common light
of lamp and fire only when I am safely under
my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A
Man never deserts me: he haunts the solitary
country lanes, lush and lovely with spring; he
pops out upon me from mountain woods; on
the stretches of beach he lurks just around the
point. He is always there; at least, I suppose
he is, for I never am — alone.

By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at
night he becomes, like that figure in my
dream, pure devil. I am a suburbanite, and
as I said before, a lady, a laboring lady. This
is why I find myself not infrequently alone at
night. The alarm set a-quiver when I de-
scend from the social, bright-lit, suburban car
and plunge forth into the dark is something
that custom cannot stale. Yet sometimes the
spell of the night is as a buckler against fear,
making me wonder if solitude is really terror,
genuine solitude, solitude belonging to me,
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The Lady Alone at Night

and not to A Man. I remember one early-
winter evening, white with a recent snowfall;
there had been an ice storm, and our trees
were all incased, each tiniest twig, and the full
moon rode low: I forgot A Man, in every nerve
I was glad to be alone, but hark, a step in the
distance, and earth again! ,

It is worth some study, the sensation of
that approaching step, that emerging shadow,
— bifurcated or petticoated, two feet or four?
I am never afraid of two men: neither
actually nor grammatically can A Man be
two. Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for
precedent, dissension steps in between vio-
lence and its victim so soon as the aggressive
party is multiplied by even two. And as for
a group of men, whatever their caste or con-
dition, however socially uncouth, by mere
virtue of numbers they become a protection
rather than a peril; by mere aggregate of
protective instinct, A Man sufficiently multi-
plied equals Men {supra).

In addition to these distinctions in regard
to the number of your potential aggressor,
there are also distinctions geographic and geo-
metric. I appeal to any lady of my sex and
condition, whether there is not the greatest
possible difference in amount of peril to be
inferred between the man who is walking in

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The Lady Alone at Night

front of you on a lonely street, and the man
who is walking behind. If a man paces on
soberly and regularly some few discreet rods
ahead, straightway he is enhaloed with suc-
cor and salvation, — you are safe, you need
only to call him in your need, and he will save.
But should he go more slowly, fall behind,
then in the very instant of passing you this
same protecting saint becomes decanonized,
and worse. There is nothing so suspicious as
this dropping behind. True, you preserve a
bold back, walk no faster, — note, sir, my
valiancy, my unconcern, — but still your knee
crooks for flight, and your vocal cords con-
tract for that scream you wonder if you could
ever really utter. A corresponding transfor-
mation in moral intention, blackguard and
chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear.
On a recent evening I was hurrying home
along the solitary street — steps behind! Fly-
ing, pursuing steps! Nearer, nearer! Upon
me, and my heart sickened and stopped beat-
ing! But past me, fleeting on and on, disap-
pearing, oh, too swiftly! For as he left me so
quickly again to solitude, I could hardly resist
an impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper
after, after my retreating protector. I think
he made his train.

I have been at some pains to prove the sec-
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The Lady Alone at Night

ond of my introductory assertions. The rea-
son I have not tried to prove the first is ex-
plained by the difference between the essay
and polite society. In polite society, one is
under the ^obligation of confessing one's vir-
tues, not blatantly, but none the less persist-
ently, wearily, — one's dogging old virtues,
as if it were not enough of a bore to live with
them in private without having to be seen
with them in public. In the essay one may
have the exquisite pleasure of confessing one's
vices. In society I must be a lady; in the essay
I may be, as here and now, a coward.

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VII

In Sickness and in Health

I HAVE been sick, but not utterly, — a
tooth. I am in the convalescent's mood
of confidence and confession; therefore, I
write in haste, for in health I am buoyant and
amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed,
there is little then to be penitent about. For
a week I have been very unpleasant, and the
circumstance leads to remarks on the moral
disintegration attendant upon indisposition.
I speak of petty disorders, for illnesses of
dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for
instance, sometimes tend to spiritual up-
building, — at least, it is so demonstrated in
fiction. Doubtless the pawing of the white
horse in the dooryard has a soothing effect
upon the patient's nerves, but illnesses in
which one has not the comfort of composing
one's epitaph are not composing to the soul.
The lesser ailments make appalling holes in
our integrity: myself last week threw a tea-
spoon at my most immediate forbear. Fero-
cious, but it was the elemental ferocity of suf-
fering. It is a fact, belonging rather to the
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In Sickness and in Health

science of psychology than of medicine, that
small sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I ap-
peal to all connoisseurs in invalidism whether
a tooth, an ear, an ankle, are not more direct
in their methods of torture than pneumonia,
smallpox, or appendicitis. Believing this, I
have always had much sympathy for the vili-
fied hero of a certain novelette of my ac-
quaintance; in this romance, the husband has
a tooth; the wife, a heart, — a literal heart,
mechanical, physiological. ^Everybody knows
which suffered more, and yet because the
gentleman got a little crusty over a most
outrageous molar, how joyously the author
trounced him through page after pagel I am
hot with indignation. There ought to be a
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Creations. Manufacturers of heroes and hero-
ines should not be allowed to flay and burn
and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane
reading public should take from them the
prerogative of so unnatural a parenthood.

This one man should have been forgiven;
he had a toothache, and non-fatal illnesses
may make monsters of the meekest of us; but
fortunately, the illness being temporary, so is
the monster. Only the recollection is humiliat-
ing; I am recovered, but I shudder at the
legion so recently cast out of me. Sickness

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In Sickness and in Health

sets free all the processes of atavism, and
whirls us back into savagery at a breathless
rate. The first bit of baggage we leave be-
hind us on this rapid return journey is family
affection. Last week my kin stood about my
couch day and night with poultices and sym-
pathy in their hands. I took the poultices and
tossed back evil words out of my mouth. I
looked upon my relatives with frankest loath-
ing. Why? Their insulting forbearance, their
aggressive meekness, their pbor-sufferer-here-
is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred the foun-
dations of my bile. Their serene patience
provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and
I was impotent; their invulnerability was an
affront to my powers of invention. My own
possibilities of vituperation were only less
surprising to me than the endurance of the
abused. And all the time that I listened to my
own reviling tongue, my sel£respect was ebb-
ing from me most uncomfortably, — and it
was all their fault.

A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our
civilization is that of the sense of humor.
Being so recently returned from barbarism
and its beyond, I can confidently assert that
the ape and the savage, while they may be
laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of
the not very sick, the brightest witticisms
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seem only studied banalities. There is no
comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is
all unrelieved tragedy. Yet it is not the hu-
morous, but the humor that is lacking, for fre-
quently the situations are appreciated at re-
covery, and furnish us amusement at intervals
for a lifetime. I doubt whether this suspen-
sion of the processes of humor could be es-
tablished in the case of serious illness, admit-
ting of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers
a-plenty who have jested at their wounds, and
instances enough on record where a timely
jest or a merry incident has saved the day. I
cite one such situation. A husband lay at
death's door, and the door was ajar. It was
midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly
the patient seemed to be sinking, slipping
from her. She put the hartshorn bottle to his
nostrils, but he could smell nothing. Both
were terrified as they realized the import of
this. Then the wife glancing down discov-
ered that the bottle contained witch-hazel.
The man laughed — and lived.

In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes
a positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities;
there is such a thing as dying game, or the
fight for life may be worth some bravado. But
imagine feeling gamy with tonsillitis or a felon
on your finger; there is absolutely no histrk

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In Sickness and in Health

onic appeal. If your sickness has no spice of
fatality, you might just as well give up; you
won't see the light of humor again until you
recover.

No love in our heart, no humor in our head,
there is another evil of savagery thrust upon
us by illness. It is the sudden acquisition of
personality by inanimate objects. What pos-
sibilities of abusive conduct lurk within the
four walls of a room yesterday, in health, per-
fectly inoffensive! What malevolence in the
wall-paper! Such a sneaking, underhand, leer-
ing pattern for curtains with any preten-
sions to respectability! How tipsy the books
look, crowding and pushing themselves askew
for very perversity! No amount of chastise-
ment will make the pillows conduct them-
selves comfortably. There is something about
the billows of that malicious counterpane that
makes me think of the oozy, oily, shiny un-
pleasantness of the ocean when the sailboat
is becalmed. I am as much at the mercy of
my furniture as any Fiji before his fetish.

Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers
or gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of
pain no greater in compass than one's little
finger-nail, — soulful, strenuous, high-step-
ping beings though we are! Sad enough to
think about; yet on the other hand, of all
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In Sickness and in Health

insupportables, the people whom sickness
makes saints are the most contemptible. I
know men and ladies, in health normal, hu-
man, unworthy, likable, — ■ but give them so
much as a cold in the head, and at once their
smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are
uplift with the watery mysticism of those
about to be canonized. When a small boy I
know voluntarily allows his younger sister a
canter on his rocking-horse, his nurse imme-
diately applies red flannel and turpentine;
generosity with him is a sure presage of sore
throat. I have seen great strapping lads, full
of sin, reduced to sudden and spurious saint-*
hood by a black eye. There is no more un-
feeling conduct than patient suffering, —
there is nothing more alarming to an anxious
family than a course of virtuous endurance
obstinately persisted in. So long as you rage
and are unseemly your kinsfolk will never
pipe their eye, but docility under the minor
physical afflictions makes a stubbed toe as
much a matter of apprehension as angina
pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid
for unmerited martyrdom. These gentle suf-
ferers are likely to employ the emaciated voice
of those who ail, knowing well that the bellow
of rebellion is much too reassuring. I am glad
I am not as one of these; sick, I throw things.

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In Sickness and in Health

Thus all mankind and all woman and child
kind, too, are divided, though unevenly, into
those who are better in sickness and those who
are worse. The marriage service on examina-
tion will be found to be a very canny docu-
ment, and its compilers nowhere showed
greater shrewdness than in just that little
phrase which insures conjugal devotion in
sickness and in health. For of some, sickness
makes Mr. Hydes, and of others, Dr. Jekylls,
and in the matter of spouses, how in the world
can the contracting parties foresee, demon or
angel, which will develop, or, having devel-
oped, which will be better company?

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VIII

zAn Educational Fantasy

TT THEN I look back upon a half-century
V V of wasted life, I find that there are no
years that accuse me of neglected opportun-
ity more poignantly than those between five
and twelve. If only I had had the foresight
then to apply myself with earnestness to the
tasks set before me! If only now I possessed
those priceless stores of knowledge that I feel
sure must then have been pumped into me!
That I must have received abundant elemen-
tary instruction I feel confident, although I
do not in the least remember receiving it. My
purely academic activities at this period re-
main wrapped in obscurity, while other mem-
ories are lively enough. I distinctly recall the
scientific invention displayed in our efforts to
produce new shades, and colors in the soapy
water wi(h which we cleaned our slates. It
was I who discovered that the yolk of an egg
well beaten made a more satisfactory admix-
ture than butter, even though both are equally
yellow to begin with. I remember how one may
by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract

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iAn Educational Fantasy

the inner riches of a chocolate drop without
visible disturbance of the outer crust. De-
spite my scholastic indifference, I can have
been no sluggard, without spirit, for of my
fifty coevals there was not one who could tag
me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and
that only (but in my wisdom I never let him
discover the fact) when I would let him; well
do I recollect with what eclat, with what flut-
ter of petticoats and pinafore, I could execute
a pas seul at hop-scotch. These attainments,
the thrill of which still warms me, prove me
not without ambition; —

" Not for such hopes and fears,
Annulling youth's brief years,
Do I remonstrate,"

but for

" Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things," —

such as the multiplication table, and the capi-
tal of Arizona, and the difference between an
adjective and an adverb, — questionings so
obstinate that I am convinced that not even
at ten years old did I know the answers; hinc
ilia lacrinus.

To some extent it is possible to go back and
piece out the stitches dropped in the course of
an education; only, one is not allowed to go
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<*y€n £ducational Fantasy

back so far as I desire. Roughly speaking, I
should say that life does not allow one to re-
learn what one has failed to learn before six-
teen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging to
eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I
hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open
a school for able-minded but ignorant grown-
ups. Believe me, enough of us could be found
to attend, enough of us glad to jump down
from our college chairs, to leave ouf labora-
tories with their clutter of advanced research,
our counting-houses with their problems, and
gladly go to school, gladly learn once and for-
ever how much nine times thirteen is, and
build Vesuvius past and present out of clay,
and follow out of doors some charming young
lady who would tell us exactly what the birds
and the wild waves are saying.

But I stipulate at the outset that f will
have no offensive superiority in my instruc-
tors. If I am to learn as a child I will be treated
as a child. I will have no one caviling at me,
for instance, because I do not know when
Washington was born. I never did know when
Washington was born, but I desire now to
amend this my iniquity of ignorance, and I
am even minded, if only my teachers will be
patient, to plod on from the Revolution to the
Civil War, and to learn the succession of bat-

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dAn Educational Fantasy

ties thereof, and which side won them. I wish
my instructors to understand that my humil-
ity of spirit needs no augmenting on their
part. I wish them to be as sweetly patient
and cheerily maternal as they would be to my
daughter's daughter. I wish my teachers to
administer boundary lines but mildly, and to
give me their minimum doses of mental arith-
metic; for in mathematics and geography my
mind is willing but weak. I think I could
promise that patience in my instructors would
have a reward in a proficiency of piipil such
as they could never hope to win from the
iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied
minds and thankless hearts they squander
such devotion.

What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it
up, this going to school again! What hap-
piness to slip out of our grown-up households,
and go forth into the morning, with book-
strap and luncheon in hand, to meet by the
way our harried and over-busy acquaintance,
men and women, some whiteheaded in ignor-
ance, perhaps, all skipping and dancing along
to the same glad place. Gleeful, we enter a
sunny room with geraniums on the window-
sill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful
young lady at the desk. We are no longer
hard and hardened children: our hearts as
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&/fn Educational Fantasy

well as our intellects are softened by the de-
bility of age, and we appreciate the gracious-
ness of our instructor with the rose in her belt,
the milk of human kindness in her eye, and
the carefully preserved smile upon her lips. It
is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we
feel arithmetic and history and geography
trickling into our craniums from the cranium
of our teacher. Then, when she feels that,
still willing, we are perhaps grown weary with
well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one
accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic,
yet instructive song, in which perhaps we are
poetically informed of some new fact about
the firefly, or the green grass, or perhaps our
own gastronomy, or in glittering phrase we
unweave the rainbow into the colors of the
spectrum. Or, to forestall the ennui resulting
from our too earnest effort, our instructor bids
us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and
with graceful contortions of her lithe young
body, directs us as we prance stiffly through
a calisthenic exercise.

But it is not on these diversions that my
fancy lingers most fondly, but on those more
solid parts of our education. How happy I
should be, for example, if I could only add,
both in my head and on paper! How many
bewildered and distrustful moments would

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&/£n £ducational Fantasy

thus be eliminated from my existence! And
if to a proficiency in addition I superadded
an adeptness in subtraction, then perhaps on
some proud day might my opinion of the bulk
of my bank account approximate more nearly
the opinion of the cashier. And if my rudi-
mentary bump of mathematics were carefully
manipulated according to the newest system of
educational massage, I might even progress
as far as percentage. I might learn how to be
richer if I could once understand the allure-
ments of compound interest. So much de-
pends on the attitude of mind that I wonder
whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit
of friendliness rather than of enmity to the
knife, they would reward me by allowing me
an entrance into their intricacies, so that I
could with impunity buy things on the bias,
or estimate the reduction by the dozen of mer-
chandise that tags a half-cent to its price when
purchased singly. There are, besides, other
valuable facts to be gleaned from the study
of arithmetic, the possession of which would
be matter for gloating. How proudly I should
proclaim to some ignorant companion of a
country stroll the number of feet in a mile! I
should be happy to know under all circum-
stances the number of ounces in a pound,
grocer's or apothecary's: how exalted I should
80

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d/fn £ducational Fantasy

be if I knew the exact amount of a scruple,
that being a fact of which I am sure most
of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive
knowledge of weights and measures would
not only entitle one to distinction among one's
acquaintance, but would open up many new
avenues of interest in one's daily life.

History is another of the subjects for which
I hanker; not history as it is administered to
me now, spiced for the mature palate, with
philosophy and evolution, the ebb and flow of
tendencies, but history for the infant mind, the
bread and milk of history, as it were. I have
sometimes thought that historic research
would be easier for me if sometimes I knew
what men did before I was forced to under-
stand why they did it; and a simple state-
ment of what the actual fact is under con-
sideration would clarify for me much of the
historian's discussion of cause and effect. I
have a distinct conception of the develop-
ment of the great and glorious English peo-
ple, but even such knowledge would be ma-
terially strengthened if I were able instantly
to sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and
stow them away in their proper cubby-holes
among the embarrassment of decades. As to
my own respected fatherland, I have discussed
intelligently the growth of the spoils system,

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<±An Educational Fantasy

skipping from presidential term to presi-
dential term with all a grown-up's airy supe-
riority; but ask me by whom and when and
why North Carolina was colonized, or just
what Captain John Smith was about when
Pocahontas intercepted the executioner, and
you have me, I want to study history at last
fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little
textbook that I can stow away handily in my
brain, with fine fair outlines at beginning and
end of it, and all important events made
salient by heavy type, and a brisk brushing
together of one's information by a resume
after each chapter. Such a primer would
greatly assist xjae in my study of the meta-
physics of history.

Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impos-
sibilities; perhaps this school I so happily
image forth would refuse to teach me what
I want to know. Possibly such information
belongs only to the period of my negligent in-
fancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher,
exuding the wit and wisdom of the newest
normal school, would refuse to stand and de-
liver the knowledge I long for. If I desired
the facts of the French and Indian War, I
might merely be set to building wigwams and
drawing braves in war-paint with colored
crayons on the blackboard. Perhaps after all
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there is nobody left who knows how to teach
the things I have forgotten. For example, do
they now acknowledge in the primary curri-
culum that fair, old-fashioned study called pen-
manship? I yearn to be put once more into a
copybook. I long to set forth once more wise
saws in round v's and unquestioned i's and
fs. My fingers long since became callous and
conscienceless to distinguish t from /, b from
p 9 and I wish somebody would reform the
rascally old digits. It would be a great relief
to my friends and myself if I could only be-
come legible in my old age.

One branch of knowledge little emphasized
in my youth, however, I could be sure of re-
ceiving at the hands of my fair instructress of
to-day, — I refer to that varied information
known as " nature-study." I am greatly de-
ficient in nature-study. I own to an unanalyt-
ical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors.
So long as the wild flowers make a glory at
my feet, I have never cared much to 6hred
them into pistil and corolla and stamen. So
long as the small fowls make me melody, I
have never cared to know the color of their pin-
feathers. But I would fain amend all this and
die knowing something. I picture our band
of eager grown-ups pouring over the country-
side in the wake of our animated and instruc-

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d/€n Educational Fantasy

tivc conductor, — peering into the grass to
lay bare the soul in the sod, blinking our old
eyes to discover the bird in his coverts, cock-
ing our dull ears to classify the notes of his
song. I see us disporting ourselves over the
landscape, busily seeking some curious knowl-
edge, and then scampering back to our
teacher with treasure trove of leaf or flower or
pebble or captured insect. Sweetly she com-
mends our application, and explains the exact
nature of our find. We swell with knowledge
momentarily, and return to more prosaic
tasks elate, having hung its proper label on
blade and bush, bird and bough. What a
satisfaction it would be, after having lived
with nature for a lifetime in awesome igno-
rance, to feel that one had at last assailed
her and ascertained her secrets!

As a young child, I must have been singu-
larly limited in mental scope; I cannot other-
wise explain my well-remembered aversion to
geography. Those parti-colored maps streaked
with inky rivers, and bordered by the wiggling
lines of the Gulf Stream, filled me with loath-
ing. The revolving globe, and that oft-re-
peated image which likens the earth to an
orange flattened at the poles, seemed to me
almost sickening. How bitterly do I repent
my obstinacy! Besides, there is not one trace
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left now of my former aversion. In fact, geog-
raphy appeals to me to-day as if it were a
brand-new branch of study, so well did I suc-
ceed in not learning it as a child. I have tried
ever since reaching maturity to make up my
geographical deficiencies, but with small suc-
cess. Often do I find myself relegated to the
dunce-seat in the minds of the company pres-
ent. Despite my constant effort, there are
certain countries that always elude my grasp,
notably Burma and New Zealand, and there
is always for me an airy insubstantiality
about the entire continent of South America.
Within my own beloved country, certain
rivers have a way of turning up in unex-
pected States when I supposed that they had
long comfortably emptied themselves into the
ocean; and there are some cities which always
flit with agility to and fro across the map.

I wonder if my early antagonism to geog-
raphy might perhaps have been due to a
shrewd sense of its uselessness to me at that
stage of my existence. Stay-at-home as I
was, why trouble myself with strange lands
until necessary? Yet I was lacking in fore-
sight, and should be grateful now if only I had
packed away some information against the
day I should need it, whereas nowadays I
find traveling without any knowledge of geog-

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zAn Educational Fantasy

raphy stimulating but inconvenient. This ob-
servation leads me to a broader one on the
topsy-turvy nature of our present educational
sequence: those studies most astute and use-
less we put in the college curriculum, and those
most immediate and practical to the college
graduate about to grapple with life, we rele-
gate to the elementary school, where the chil-
dren neither desire nor need to master them.
I would suggest a turning about. Let the col-
lege youth and maid who will suffer from a
lack of practical arithmetic learn to add a
column accurately; let the irresponsible in-
fant sport with trigonometry and conic sec-
tions. These subjects unlearned or forgotten,
one could still go through life unfretted by
the loss. So with other subjects forever lost
to us because entrusted to the intelligence of
careless infancy. I wo^ild teach geography
and handwriting in the senior year at college,
and put philosophy in the primary school. So
would the young collegian go forth upon life
well equipped, and not come to fifty years bur-
dened with regrets for knowledge lost forever, —
as I. I have kept afloat in higher mathematics,
I have delved into the mines of science, I have
trod air with many a prancing philosopher, —
therefore who so well fitted as I to appreciate
at last the peace of having a foundation!

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IN the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame
de Brillaye, not inaptly named by the au-
thor the " Journal of a Wicked Old Woman/*
you remember that scene in the pleasaunce
at Chateau Vernot, where the turf was like
fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into
all manner of shapes unarboreal, — she liked
to have her trees dressed, she said, — " There
is something indecent in great naked branches
sprawling the good God knows where." The
little old lady is sitting with her great, old-
ivory cane across her knees; she rolls it back
and forth with her little old-ivory hands,
while she scolds Aimee — as always. Aimee
has just come through that brisk little en-
counter of hers with de Brontignac, and
seems to have allowed her raiment to look a
little battle-worn. " Go dress yourself, baby,"
cries Madame Great-Aunt. " Will you let your
very laces whimper? Into your rose velvet
brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as
if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts
than they Ve ever broken: the second, men's;

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the first, women's. Now you think you have
a soul; when you are my age, you will know
that women are not souls, but dresses. I look
back; my history is the history of my gowns;
undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are my-
self." (A few lines above I used the word
" remember," but merely for the sake of an
effective start-off. Madame and her memoirs
do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am
not the first to perpetrate a spurious quota-
tion; I am merely the first to confess it. To
proceed.) It is not the first time that the
little old de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is
she true in this passage, or merely epigram-
matic? If my history is the history of my
clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as
it were, the meditations of the pupa upon its
successive integumenta. Yet the figure is in-
felicitous. In fact, the chrysalis image is not
over-pretty as regards this side of eternity:
pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chest-
nut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it
is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability
with one's self which makes life entertaining;
there is nothing chat-worthy in a worm. Be
it granted me to regard these accidental rags
of lawn or wool or silk I find adherent, these
hardly less transitory hands and feet, this
hardly more durable incasing occipital, not
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as a worm incarcerate, but with the detach-
ment and ufrtif t of the incipient butterfly.

Why not my philosophy of my clothes, —
the pronoun italicized, meaning not Teufels-
drockh'p, but my own, both the clothes and
the philosophy? Let me here and now make
some effort toward system and definition,
toward order out of chaos, in that long chap-
ter in a woman's story, my lady's wardrobe.
How far have these successive wrappings
around and prankings out of diverse colors
and tissues that are to my fellow passengers
labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of what
age, sex, nation, education, and caste I may
be, — how far have these clothes of mine
served for triumph or undoing in my spiritual
history, the life-history of this " celestial am-
phibian," myself?

The clothes of babyhood first. It is a strong-
minded adult who does not grow sentimental
in regarding the garments of his infancy, —
those caps and bibs and socks reminding us
of the wabbling heads, the aching gums, the
simian feet, of the days when we, for all our
present arrogance of maturity, were the sport
of colic and nutritive experiment.

How explain the repugnance of the newly
born to clothing, the birth-wail that pleads
for the sincerity of the nude, protests against

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the cloakings of convention? Strange para-
dox that the first emotion of the baby soul
should be bitterness against all those contriv-
ances of decency, those hemstitched linens
and embroidered flannels, through which the
mother heart eased its brooding love. The
little pink, squirming creature, fresh out" of
eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the
wrappings of finite human care. That is why
we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really
are; all the clothes and the conventions were
ready for us; before we had a glimpse at our-
selves we were popped into them; it is a
merciful long while before we are old enough
to undress sufficiently to discover, away in-
side, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego,
with its eerie eyes.

Thus it is that when I first find myself in
those early, misty recesses I see myself all
dressed, dressed for company inspection; I
am a little girl wearing a crispness of brown
curl and a crispness of white muslin; I wear
white stockings and Burt's shoes. — I recog-
nize, also, quite in the same way, as envelop-
ing facts, without which I may not present
myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a
peppery, passionate temper, and an imagi-
nation, — that is what seeing people in void
air and talking to them is called. Thus clad
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and ticketed, I go pattering along the pil-
grimage.

How little clothes mattered then! All spun
about with fairy films and the witchery of
talking trees and singing winds, I did not re-
member my clothes./ But at times clothes
broke in abruptly oi? my unconsciousness. I
well remember a certain mitten. It was a
brown mitten on my left hand. My mother
and I were walking down a flight of stone
steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand,
retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped
unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resent-
ment against that mitten endured long. It
was a surprise, a disappointment, this treach-
ery of the accepted; so my clothes were not
to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye
on them. The mitten episode marks a step
in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might
at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson
I have not yet found it safe to unlearn.

In those days there was a plpasant interest
attached to the Burt's shoes, — not when
new and shiny, but later, when they had be-
come well worn. Some unexpected morning
I would espy a peering bit of white stocking
looking out from the blackness of the leather
toe. The hole being not yet so large or so
alarming as the cobbler's charges, a piece

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of black silk was adjusted over the stocking,
the foot deftly slipped into the shoe, a dash of
blacking applied to the whole, and behold
only mother and I knew the difference.

Penury as such was not yet known to me.
The consciousness of shabbiness had not yet
frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was
merely interesting, beguiling the tedium of
the sanctuary, and affording meditation on
the ingenuity of mothers.

Here succeeded several years of tranquil-
lity in my relations to my garments, until, at
the age of six, I found myself — infelix! — re-
moved to a town possessing a bleak climate
and many woolen manufactories. It was the
custom of the house mothers to buy flannel
by the piece direct from the factory, red flan-
nel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander, and
the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flan-
nel was cut a garment, a continuous, all*
embracing garment, of neuter gender, in
which every child in that town might have
been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like
after the morning bath. A pattern was given
to our mother.

The hair shirt — I laugh when I read! By

definition the hair shirt must have possessed

geographical limits of attack, but my flannels

left no pore untickled, untortured; they heated

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the flesh until scarlet fever paled into a mere
pleasantry; and they soured the milk of ami-
ability within me forever. The rotation of
the seasons reduced itself to terms of red
flannel. In the autumn, when the happy
fowls and foliage alike moulted, shed the su-
perfluous, when bracing October set the body
in a glow, I alone of living things must be
done up in flannel! And more, — did you
ever try to draw on your stocking smoothly
over a red flannel tumor at the ankle, and
then attempt to button over the whole the
shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing
at all? Did you ever tear off shoe and stock-
ing, and, dancing red-legged and barefooted,
cry out in frenzy that you would eschew
breakfast and school, aliment and enlighten-
ment, but never, never, never again would
you wear footgear? Thus autumn. And
spring, that season of vernal bourgeoning,
was the time when I, too, like any other
seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy incasings,
and could sprout and spring in air and sun,
clad in blessed, blessed muslin. I shall never
forget the corroding bitterness induced by
flannels. At times they absolutely reduced
me to fisticuffs with my religion, so that filial
piety, the ordaining of the seasons, and the
very catechism itself, hung in the balance of

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the conflict. I believe I can hardly over-esti-
mate the spiritual detriment done me by my
flannels.

One incident of this, my first decade, I
recall with mingled respect and envy: —

" It is not now as it hath been of yore."

" Choose," commanded my mother, " will
you have a new dress this winter or i St. Nich-
olas ' for next year? " I was stung at the im-
plication that for such as me there could have
been a doubt of the choice. " St. Nicholas,"
of course! A magazine doth not wax old as
doth a garment, and besides, is not reading
more than raiment? Alas for the high intel-
lectuality of eight years old! If the choice lay
now between the dress and the book, would
I hug the volume and walk among my fellows
gladly shabby? I would not.

About at this same period we were visited
by a family of strange little girls. There were
three of them; they stayed three days, they
changed their dresses three times a day, and
they never wore the same dress twice. We
regarded them as we might have regarded the
fauna of Mars, — they were an utterly new
thing. It was wonder at first, then pity, then
wonder again, for we found that they liked it!
Being little human animals even as we, they
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would rather be tricked out in fresh frocks
than play tag! What were we going to wear
that evening, they asked. Why, how in the
world should we know? Something clean, of
course. Our visitors' bits of frocks were em-
broidered, beribboned, bevelveted in a man-
ner simply incomprehensible. What in the
world happened when they got dirty? That
visit filled me with prophetic misgivings;
some day I should have to wear stuff goods.
In a vision I saw the great gulf that separates
the grown-up who cannot be put through the
wash-tub from the child who can. Horror of
the unwashable! " Shades of the prison-
house," — Oh, no !

Just here the retrospect reaches the place
where the road turned; I do not say, forked,
for it was not a question of alternatives; I was
a woman-child, and I had to keep on in the
only way. Hitherto my clothes had been as
much or as little myself as the down of the
chick, or the fur of the rabbit. Providence
and my parents had provided my apparel
without the faintest solicitude on my part,
leaving me free to attend to my body and
soul. This could not long endure. It is the
era of Mother Hubbards that bridges together
the old time and the new. The Mother Hub-
bard was so noteworthy, so startling, in fact,

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after the trimness to which we were accus-
tomed, this

" Robe ungirt from clasp to hem."

It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation
like the pictures in the mythology. I first ad-
mired, then coveted, then teased my mother
into making me one. It was finished just
after dinner, and though it was yet early for
dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon the
street, which, to my disappointment, was
empty of children. There I strutted, and
swelled, and waited for the others to come
and see, and was exalted, not recognizing the
first shackles of my slavery. Now, first, I
become acquainted with Fashion; now, first,
I regard other people's clothes as the most
important factor in the production of my
own. Too truly it is the close of the first
chapter, the end of innocence, the end of joy,
the end of sexlessness. I am irrevocably a
woman: imitation and emulation are hence-
forth the distinguishing motives of my cos-
tume. Now, first, I look in the glass to see
my frock, and then I look a little higher to
see that face and that mop of curls I wear,
and I wonder what colors best suit them. I
look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they
tell me, and I wonder what external clothes
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and conduct are most becoming to those eyes
and to that inner meshed personality they
reveal. What is becoming! The word is epi-
tome of all that the grown-up is and the child
is not.

The period of my teens was the period
when my wardrobe was continually in abey-
ance upon the higher claims of my educa-
tion. It was not possible simultaneously to
beautify my brain and my body. I acqui-
esced in the circumstance, for the most part,
with occasional fits of passionate revolt, and
more or less constant misanthropy. I blush
to recall that at one time the light which
was in me turned to darkness for a year or
more, and all on account of my clothes. I
found myself at a great city school, I a shy
little country waif, most curiously clad. I
looked at the clothes of my compeers, and
I locked my lips and my heart against all
converse with my fellows, and I walked to
the top of my classes in a desolation of spirit
that was tragic. I would have exchanged my
monthly reports with those of my most ad-
dle-pated classmate if I could have had her
clothes. Never since have I approached the
intellectual achievement of fourteen; but the
shabbiness of my motives was greater than
that of my costume* The effect was not wholly

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evil, but I here confess that I never should
have learned Latin rules if I had been pret-
tily dressed. I wanted to show those stylish
misses that there was no backwoods brain
under my backwoods hat — that was all! I
attributed to others a snobbishness wholly
my own, and for that once clothes came peri-
lously near costing me all human joy in hu-
man friendship. If my wardrobe had never
bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,
— and incidentally have furnished meteoric
display for a dozen universities. My clothes
improved; I am not friendless, but dull and
illiterate, and all through the shaping destiny
of dress.

This paragraph in my history yields me
this much of philosophy as regards the influ-
ence of clothes on the social relations. My
dress, so long as it be not conspicuous for dis-
order, disruption, or display, has much less
effect on others than on myself. But as for
myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained
of fate that I be forever subdued to what I
wear, I shall never, except when I believe my-
self suitably dressed, be able to look my fel-
low creature in the eye with the level gaze of
conscious equality which alone gains friend-
ship. No woman was ever so proud as not to
cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so
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happy as not to be made unhappy by her
clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to the
breezes, — there is no exaltation like that
of knowing one's costume stylish, becoming,
and, if possible, expensive. Only by recog-
nizing our limitations may we women success-
fully cope with them; one's own respect is
surest guarantee of other people's; for women
self-respect is soonest secured by clothes:
therefore, O women, dress!

I have digressed from the contemplation
of my girlhood, but I have not exhausted that
time, for I have not touched upon second-
hand clothes or long dresses. As a girl I was
perpetually made over. I came to regard fresh
material as something almost sacrilegious.
Of all gift-horses, clothes are the most difficult
not to criticize, and especially old clothes.
My prosperous cousins did not possess my
complexion, my tastes, or my figure, and yet
I inevitably succeeded to their clothes, so
that I came to watch their expenditures with
morbid interest, and if they asked for my
advice, the strings of my sincerity were se-
verely strained by " a lively sense of favors
yet to come." In such circumstances it is well
to have in the family one who is mother,
dressmaker, and genius, all in one, for only
such a combination of inspiration and devo-

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tion could have kept my head up in those
days when I was always second-hand.

To be honest, am I anything else now?
What else is it to be fashionable? With brain
or scissors every woman is snipping and clip-
ping and cutting over other people's clothes
to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes exist-
ent only in the fashion papers or her dress-
maker's brain, but what is the difference?
Every woman wears what somebody else
has worn. What woman would wear a dress
she had not first seen on another woman?
Old clothes, making over, copying, copying,
copying, — dear me, how second-hand we
women are!

The years from sixteen to twenty are those
years in a woman's life when dress becomes
an ecstasy — as never afterwards. We al-
ways look in the glass when we put on our
hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not
the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at,
at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder.
For some few years Heaven lets dress be a
sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and
decency of childhood, or the studied con-
cealment of imperfections of maturity, but a
revelation of the new self of which we are
neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but
the working of natural laws; in the spring do
ioo

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not the very trees prank themselves out in
a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink
and preen in the mirroring water, arranging
their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves
for the masculine regard of sunbeams and
breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as
unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf
sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrill-
ing of new joy, and the leaf is a new and
beautiful thing. What is it, what am I be-
coming? Look in the glass and see. That is
womanhood burning in my eyes, on my
cheeks, — Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too,
if you wish. When my skirts have grown all
the way down, and my braids all the way up,
then there will be coronation robes ready,
and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only
a schoolgirl, but it is ^ill coming, coming, com-
ing! Do you wonder that she counts each
inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience,
that she arranges her hair high on her head at
night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense,
and something else. Then one day it is the
hour at last, — it is the first long dress, cut to
show the regal throat, trained like a queen's.
The hair is piled up diadem-wise. The princess
is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper
taps the floor — " I am all dressed for you. I am
waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry! "

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But, O little Princess, it is not at all like
what you think, really; so soon your long
skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes
with delight, and your coroneted tresses will
seem to have grown that way. The Prince
will have come, and you will have got used to
him, or he will not have come, and you will
have forgotten that you ever expected him;
the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a
rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You
will find yourself wearing a personality re-
stricted by that thing you have somehow
acquired, called a style of your own, and
restricted also by the style of all the other
women in the world, so that you will find
yourself wearing those dresses only, and say-
ing those words only, that both yourself and
others expect of you; it will not seem a very
wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But
remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you
must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing
to the end.

What mockery to prate of the equality of
the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom
of uniform, and the other is the slave of
ever-varying costume! Think of the great
portion of a lifetime we women are con-
demned to spend merely on keeping our sleeves
in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship

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or politics when we are all our days panting
disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion,
who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a
little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first
article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for
one, am last of ladies to declare myself a here-
tic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and
species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air, —
what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul
unexpressed either by vocal throat or person-
ality of plumage! Among things furred or
feathered it is the male who dresses and the
lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise
with human beings is due, I suppose, to some
freakish bit of chivalry on the part of the au-
tocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts
the entire menagerie through their tricks. No>
I would not be a fowl; let me not repine;
let me at this business of dressing, pluckily.

Women are nobler than men; it is because
we are purified in the fires of more severe temp-
tation. Man does not encounter the demoral-
izing influence of the dressmaker, that crea-
ture with mouth of pins and suave words. To
what degrading subterfuge are we not re-
duced to get our own way with the dress-
maker, seeing with what delight and dex-
terity she lifts her spurning foot against our
desires! Do we presume to know what we

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want to wear? — alternately she sporteth and
scorneth — and yet we lift not against her her
proper scissors. She practices dark arts; she
runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and
the wrinkle is no more seen — until the dress
comes home. Lies are about her head. Her
promises are vanity, and her bills elastic as a
fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity alone can
move her; the gown must be sent home, for
we attend a wedding in twenty minutes; even
now the caterer "hath paced into the hall";
or we leave for California in an hour, and even
now our sleeper paws the track. By the ways
of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed,
and yet so signal is female virtue that after
centuries of dressmakers we are still un-
scathed in our integrity, and are still the
church-goers of the species.

There is something stirring to contemplate
in woman's devotion to dress, — to see how
we lay down health and comfort, and clamber
up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the
aesthetic. That is what our dressing is to us, —
an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its
radiance, and did on "blacks," what loss to
popular culture! What of the universal hun-
ger for color and form if so many curiosities of
craft, so many animated works of art no
longer whisked about the streets of the world?
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For another reason, also, we are preoccu-
pied of our costume, — our invincible frank-
ness; for we would have our clothes the ex-
pression of our souls. With what fondness we
cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle
of subtleties is woman that words are too gross
— a black coat and trousers an insincerity —
for the hundred shades of shifting color and
form that we are inside. Though it take half
our life, let us be true to our clothes, our
clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the
lady a symphony of soul and silk.

Verily, "my soul on its lone way" has trav-
eled far from the days of babyhood, kicking
against all wrappings, to the days of woman-
hood, when personality exists not, separate
from frocks and hats and gloves and shoes,
and both the inner layer of individuality and
the outer layer of costume have become cosy
and comfortable, so that by no means do I
wish to lay them aside.

What next? Some day I shall be given into
the hands of those who

" fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead."

Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready
for me, of skyey tissues and opalescent tints?
Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again

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be slowly subdued to the clothing and conven-
tions of another world?

Or when I pop up the lid of this uphol-
stered bone-box, my body, shall my soul be
then and there set free, — escaped, volatile,
elemental, as wind or moonshine, having cast
from it — one by one as a garment — age, sex,
race, creed, and culture? But what if in this
off-shedding I strip from me my personality,
myself? This involuted wrapping in which I
am duly done up and ticketed and passed
about among my acquaintance, — what if to
rend this were to leave me in the shivering
nakedness of the impersonal?

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The Tendency to Testify

PEOPLE and periods sometimes think
strange things about themselves. I am
constantly astounded by the contrast between
my view of my friend and his view of himself.
Tact is the bridge that spans the chasm be-
tween a man's opinion of himself and his
neighbor's opinion of him. In truth each
opinion suffers from the lie of the label. There
is nothing so volatile as human personality,
yet it has a passion for ranging itself in bottles
on a shelf, each with its little gummy ticket.
If the peril of the pigeon-hole is great for the
individual, it is even greater for a whole period,
which is but the aggregate of personalities,
each of them only a breath, a vapor, the shap-
ing of a cloud.

One of the largest, loudest labels with which
we placard the present age is its irreligion.
Because we don't build cathedrals? But let
any one of us look about into the hearts of
say twenty of his immediate friends: are there
no churches building there? As for me, I am
quite dinned by their hammers, and often,

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The Tendency to Testify

when I want to steal into some one's soul, for
a little quiet communion, I am incommoded
by the obtrusive scaffolding. No religion?
Never so many religions, and from that very
fact, never so genuine. Obviously, if you
make a religion yourself, it's your business to
believe it. There is an analogy between clothes
and creeds: you wear with a different air those
your father has bought for you and those you
have earned for yourself.

I do not find people indifferent to religion, I
find them profoundly responsible for it; my
friends stand each at the door of a temple ex-
acting tribute, although there is not one who
would not be horrified by the blatancy of the
metaphor. They do not call themselves reli-
gious, but they do call to me to come in. The
trouble perhaps is with my listening ear. I
was born with it, and without my will, or
knowledge, it has become an inconveniently
obvious appendage. It takes a great deal of
time to have a listening ear. It has heard so
many creeds of late that I must perforce
counter-label this irreligious age devout. I
am not inventing the list, and I do not believe
the variety among my acquaintance excep-
tional, — Neo-Hellenic, Neo-Hebrew, Catho-
lic, Christian Scientist, Episcopal, high, hot,
and holy, Episcopal, low, hot, and holy, Swe-
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The Tendency to Testify

denborgian, Baptist, Presbyterian, and, latest,
a sect that scorns a name, but that I would
call Destinarian. Miss Sinclair is of this com-
munion, for, in "The Three Brontes," does
she not call upon Destiny to account for every
mystery of those three strange lives? The
religion of the Destinarian consists in not hav-
ing one, yet not one of my friends pronounces
so reverently the name of deity as my friend
of this no-faith murmurs the word, Destiny.
"It is ordained," she says of some circum-
stance, and says it with awe, the humility be-
fore omniscience with which the Hebrew
prophets spoke his name Jah.

There they stand, my twenty men and
women, beckoning me to the doors of their
temples; and yes, of course, I go in; it saves
argument. I go into each and each friend is
so busy pointing out the architecture that no
one ever notices when I slip out, out into the
open. When one stops, to think of it, it is curi-
ously old-fashioned and orthodox, the open,
whether it is sea or sun. The planets are con-
spicuously conservative, but the morning
stars still sing together.

Now, not one of my friends here listed is
that good old-fashioned work of God, a shout-
ing Methodist, and yet, in effect, there is not
one of them who is not exactly this. As a child,

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I attended camp-meetings, I heard people
testify. The tendency to testify is older than
camp-meetings, and it will outlast them. To-
day, though long grown-up, I find my friends
still shouting their experiences, I find myself
still the shy and wondering congregation. As
in the word "camp-meeting" there is military
reminiscence, so the "professor" is lineal de-
scendant of miles gloriosus, his survivor in the
church militant. A puzzling number of peo-
ple still like to exhibit their scars; a larger
number like to exhibit the particular philo-
sophic armor by which they — by implication
— win in the battle of life still ever merrily
waging. But he who shows a scar deserves
another, and no sword ever equally fitted two
hands.

It is the implication that I resent in all testi-
fying, — super-sensitive doubtless. I do not
want to be converted. I grow shy and secret
when I suspect my friend of wanting to re-
model me to the pattern of his creed. The
most perilous thing in friendship is to let a
friend know that we want to reform him. The
very essence of friendship is in the lines, —

" Take me as you find me, quick,
If you find me good! "

and in a recent dedication to one who was
"Guide, philosopher, but friend." In all testi-
no

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The Tendency to Testify

fying, there is an implied "Copy me," which
our own skittish ego resents. We all incorpor-
ate in ourselves our friends' virtues, but only
those of which they are most unconscious;
whereas people are always conscious of their
battles; they always want to talk about them;
and yet how many different ways there are of
winning the same battle. If I admire your
bravery, I may copy the creed that created it,
but you need not hold up that creed for my in-
spection, for it is you yourself who are under
my inspection. You are your sole argument,
you need no testifying.

I have been much talked to of late, and
much talked at. I have seen the fanatic spark
in eyes that would have been aghast to know
its presence there. Once upon a time there
was only one church, and excommunication
from that was a simple and straightforward
matter; it can hardly be an irreligious age
when one can feel, in listening to the testi-
mony from the score of temples one's friends
have built, that one is in danger of being ex-
communicated from all twenty. But better
excommunication th'an that, entering and
accepting, I, too, might feel called upon to
testify.

I, too, could testify, — I, a mere sunwor-
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my private chapel, most ancient and most
orthodox. I could repeat for you the liturgies
the wind has made, much the same that it
chanted for Moses on Sinai; for are any of
your creeds so new, my friends? I could point
out to you altar-lights genial and tolerant, the
taper-flames of stars. There was once One
long ago who went to the mountain for prayer,
for there is nothing new about the temple of
out-of-doors; but if I, its worshiper, do not
carry forth some peace from its great silence,
some joy from its godly mirth, then would not
even my infinite temple shrink to the size of
words, if I should testify?

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Letters and Letter-Writers

IT is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is
a bygone art. Arguments for this opinion
point to the array of picture-cards expressing
every sentiment known to experience, and
saving, by the neatness and dispatch of their
machine-made couplets, all the fumbling
effort we used to expend in saying thank you
to a hostess, bon voyage to a friend, or even in
offering sympathy to one bereaved. The
night-message also seems to indicate a sorry
substitution for the formality of the post. The
truth is that the picture-card, by doing the
work of the duty letter, clears the way for
the real letter, so spontaneous that it can't
help being written; while the night-message
contributes to epistolary art a terseness and
vigor that should not be undervalued. While
we continue to look back at the voluminous
eighteenth century and to regret the decay of
letter-writing, we are every one of us every
week receiving from a dozen different corre-
spondents letters vibrant with personality,
vivid, readable, inviting preservation. Far

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from not writing letters, people never wrote
more letters than they do to-day, nor better
ones; if ours are not so long as the letters of
the past, they are far livelier. Both in theory
and in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted
to be epistolary.

If each one of us will examine that packet of
letters we are loath to destroy because they
have made us see pictures or think thoughts
or chuckle with appreciation, we shall pause
to ponder how diverse in character are the au-
thors. One missive, guiltless of grammar, is
racy with backwoods wisdom; another shows
the rapier wit and apt allusiveness of the Hel-
lenist; another is as crisp and keen as the type-
writei^that clicked it forth; still another peals
with freshman skylarking. It is not at first
easy to perceive underlying all the variety the
essential characteristics which belong alike to
all these correspondents and which differen-
tiate that happily constituted being, the born
letter-writer; man or woman, young or old,
educated or illiterate, certain qualities he must
inalienably possess.

The letter-writer is always an observant
person. He has the pictorial eye and the pic-
torial pen. The view framed by his window
sash must never grow stale for him, across it
the clouds must always roll as if across a
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painter's canvas, and its commonplace roof-
line must keep always its quaintness and its
quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd
his day, he must see each as if staged for a
play, he must perceive the color of hair and
the cut of clothes and the connotation of atti-
tudes as vividly as if he were always seated be-
fore a rising curtain. This freshness of vision
varies in different people. It is always found
in every good letter, but of the writers, some
require the stimulus of an unusual scene;
while they have not the power to see or to
paint the pictures of Dulltown Center, they
can portray Tokio or Archangel till it glows
on the wall before the reader's eye; others,
more really gifted, see drama everywhere, even
if they have never been twenty miles from
their own farm and forest. Whether our cor-
respondent is stay-at-home or traveler, he
must so combine his gift of observation with
his gift of representation that his angle of
vision is unique. We have all of us received
narratives of travel that were colorless as
guide-books and narratives of a village sewing
society that were palpitant with portraiture.
The true letter-writer makes us feel not only
that we have been present at a scene but that
we have been present with him.
The genuine epistolary endowment shows

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qualities in pleasant poise. A letter should be
personal, but not over-personal. A self-analyst
may cover many pages of notepaper, but we
read him only under protest, and drop him
promptly into the waste-basket. We enjoy
the record of personal observation just so long
as it is balanced by detachment. We like to
see our friend moving across the scene he de-
scribes, but we don't want to see him bulking
large in his own landscape. In a well-penned
letter the people written about stand forth as
vividly as does the author. It is this power
of amused detachment that makes all true
letter-writers true humorists as well.

To write letters it is not enough to be ob-
servant, objective, humorous : one must have
the impulse to express the observation and the
fun. This impulse is, of course, the literary
will to write, but there is a sharp distinction
between the litterateur and the letter-writer.
The latter does not merely wish to write, he
wishes to write to somebody. He is not lyric,
for it is not enough for him to burst into song
unheard; he is not a diarist, for it is not enough
for him to talk to himself; he is not a genius,
for it is not enough for him to talk to a vast,
formless creature called the Public. A letter-
writer is one who finds life so entertaining
that he must talk about it to a friend. Never
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a self-sufficient person, he is as genial as he is
shy; it would therefore no more occur to him
to pour himself out upon paper that nobody
was to read than to pour himself into print
that everybody was to read. He has the lit-
erary impulse without the literary ambition.
He must be sure of his auditor before his pen
will move, and yet when it once begins to
gambol, it carries him off and away, after the
manner of all pens, until the friendly listener
becomes idealized from homely reality into
very quintessence of sympathy.

The individual auditor is not only the first
requisite for the letter-writer, but the deter-
mining influence that gives to letters them-
selves the qualities which distinguish them
from other forms of literature. Letters stand
halfway between the formlessness of conver-
sation and the formality of essay or fiction. A
letter to a friend has this advantage over a
chat with him, that you can choose the impres-
sion you wish to make and make it without
interference from the interlocutor's telepathy,
or interruption through his rejoinders. Con-
versation gives and takes, but a letter only
gives, and gives exactly what it wishes, no
more. In a letter one employs words, weaving
them happily to one's will, but it is a mistake
to suppose that conversation is much con-

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cerned with words. It is a far more shifting
and subtle thing than that, for mere speech is
constantly supplemented or corrected or con-
tradicted by the twinkle in our eyes, the taut-
ness or tremor in our voice, the twisting of our
lips. The attention of the listener is diverted
by watching all these manifestations. While it
has all the camaraderie of chat, the letter, in
the clarity and singleness of its impression, is
distinctly different from talk.

The epistolary form differs as much from
the memoir as it does from conversation. The
diarist is a self-important person, talking to
himself and to the future, and conscious of
his effect upon both. If he is great enough,
that effect is worth making, and we read his
account of himself and his times with the
reverence we accord to history. We do not
read, however, with the pleasant personal
warmth with which we peruse a letter, for we
know the diarist is not speaking as comrade
to comrade. We know and he knows that he
is speaking to posterity.

The letter has the advantage of not belong-
ing at all to conscious or commercialized
literature. It is not written to be seen of men,
nor yet to be sold to them. It is literature in-
timate, unintentional, overheard. In so much
as it is personal expression, plus detachment
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but minus self-importance, and also in so
much as it endeavors to adapt itself sym-
pathetically to another person's interest and
point of view, the letter strikes through the
merely individual and touches deep and uni-
versal feeling, thus in all its humbleness ful-
filling the ancient dictum for art. The let-
ter-writer, scribbling himself forth merely to
please himself and his friend, is not con-
strained by servility to the public taste; his
medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a
happy inconsequence, vital artistic qualities
impossible to literature written to meet the
market.

Its spontaneity gives the letter scope for its
particular achievements. Being written by
friend to friend, it is free from both shyness
and stiffness : it may laugh or cry, be sagacious
or absurd, in full confidence of being under-
stood. It rings true in its directness and in-
timacy, and yet never descends to the morbid-
ness that sometimes stains the revelations of
the journal. The letter is intimate, but at
bottom decorous. In a letter one wears one's
old clothes in comfort, but one does not un-
dress as in a diary. The presence of a friend
to whom one may open one's heart is both in-
vitation and wholesome restraint.

The letter as literature is particularly

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adapted to description made piquant by per-
sonal perception of lights and shades. The
letter is especially fitted for quick portraiture,
for flashing forth a face in an adjective, for
touching off a character in the quirk of a
phrase. Incidents also stand out by their
very compression. Brevity is the soul of a
letter, which is not saying that a letter may
not be long. A letter can afford to be long,
it can never afford to be diffuse. In the nature
of things a good letter never flags because it is
written by one possessing intensified vision
and a vibrant pen. Such a person knows
enough to stop before he is tired. The descrip-
tion, incident, comment of a letter are forced
to a concentration that gives them an advan-
tage over more formal and expansive writing.
People who are interesting enough to wish to
write letters, people who are interested enough
to wish to read them, must by necessity of
character have much else to occupy their
time beside their correspondence. The value
of epistolary writing lies in the fact that it is
not a grave concern, but an inviting side issue.
Letters, like friendship, lose their charm when
one makes a business of them.

It is the greatest mistake to think that
our hurried age is alien to the composition
of letters. Haste is the best thing that can
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happen to a letter; it enforces compression.
Actually our own time is peculiarly adapted
to produce letters. Its very hurry is inimical
to sustained writing. Thinking people may
put themselves into letters when they have no
time to put themselves into books. Not only
the rapidity of the present but its intensity
stimulates letter-writing. Even the most com-
monplace people are quickened to observa-
tion and to thought at a time when tragedies
are being unrolled before the dullest of us, and
when every day is fateful with pity and fear
for even the most obscure. Personal reaction
to the portents of the present is not to be
escaped, for never in history was there so
much to see and to feel.

As never before was there so much to see, so
never before was there such an impulse to say
something about it; but the immensity of our
time prevents our speaking in any finished
and final form. Our day is too vast for com-
ment. All that we can record is our daily im-
pressions; and how much more readily these
fall into letter shape than into treatise or
play or novel or poem! These four forms
necessitate structure, analysis, synthesis; they
presuppose penetration into the significance
back of events. The letter is free from all these
requirements, and therefore is better fitted to

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express our times than, for example, the poem,
which to-day, false to its old high calling, de-
liberately avoids all divination, all guesses at
the ultimate and the infinite.

The letter, always humble, informal, in-
consequent, need not strain to recount any
but an individual reaction and interpretation.
It aspires to no universal wisdom, and by its
very modesty and sincerity may perhaps for
the future furnish the truest historical record
obtainable of a period too terrible to under-
stand itself.

One would naturally expect letters to be
produced in an age which, bewildered as it
is, is singularly articulate in regard to all its
puzzles and its pain. Ease of expression was
never so general as now. More people are able
to say what they have to say than ever before,
and more people are able to say it, too, with
facility and with force. The newspapers are
crowded by letters tingling with penetration,
often memorable in phrasing, written by men
and wom€n in every class and place. The
level of intelligence and of expression was
never so high. People are writing not only to
the press but to each other better letters than
ever before. Impressions are so intense that
they compel utterance. One proof of the
prevalence and popularity of letter-writing

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to-day is in the many books and articles that
are the chance discoveries of the mail box.
For such revelations, such unintentional litera-
ture, every editor is on the alert. The history
of our time is being everywhere written to-day
in the best letters that were ever penned; but
for one such collection discovered, how many
are fated to be fugitive always and unpre-
served?

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XII

The Tyranny of Talent

WE come into life handicapped by
many a tyranny, but by none heavier
than the insolence of that particular ability
packed into our still imperfect cranium. Al-
though one may observe in rare individuals
the exhibition of a fine independence that
from infancy to age consistently refuses to
develop the dominance of some obvious tal-
ent, for the most part we yield to the conven-
tional views that defy such despotism, and to
our own delight in that little toy, success,
which the autocrat dangles before our eyes.
The only people never disillusioned are the
unsuccessful. Every time we succeed we take
a tuck in a dream. Of all domains, the most
desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the
only people who never lose it, who, rather,
reinherit it from day to day, are the people
who consistently and conscientiously fail.

There are, however, only an enviable few
of us who are not able to do some one thing
well. It does not need, of course, to be any-
thing notable. We need not be the fools of
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fame, in order to taste all the depths of suc-
cess. We may merely be able to tie up parcels
with neatness and dispatch, — rest assured
we shall be enforced to tie up everybody's
parcels until we totter into our graves. Most
households can boast a member with an abil-
ity to find things; the demands upon the time
and the resourcefulness of such a professional
finder prevent her ever finding peace (a finder
is, of course, always feminine). One could mul-
tiply indefinitely examples from immediate
experience that prove the argument for in-
efficiency.

The tyranny of talent has beset our path
with many little proverbs that bark at our
lagging heels. " Nothing succeeds like success "
has hounded many a man to a desolate emi-
nence. "Whatever is worth doing is worth
doing well" is a maxim that we allow to con-
trol our activities as thoroughly as we refuse
to allow it to convince our intelligence: for
obviously whatever is worth doing is not
worth doing well; on the one hand the state-
ment may authorize a wasteful and indis-
criminate energy; and, far worse, it is mani-
festly false, because everything that gives you
joy is worth doing, and ten to one the thing
that gives you most joy in the doing, is the
thing that you do very ill indeed.

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Superficially considered, success appears to
be a consequence of self-expression necessarily
gratifying; intimately experienced, success is
found to be a consequence of self-repression
most painful. The trouble is that one never
knows in time. Often one goes gambolling
into success unwittingly as a young animal,
only to have one's first joyous neigh, or bray,
of achievement cut short by feeling sudden
hands bind one to a treadmill — the treadmill
that impels one to grind out similar achieve-
ments, tramp-tramp-tramp, all the rest of
one's life. The worst is that no one ever sus-
pects the excellently efficient middle-aged
nag of still sniffing a larking canter through
the mad spring meadows of the unattempted.
Our best friends suppose the treadmill con-
tents us. Yet we are always cherishing our
own little dreams of a medium of expression
better suited to our individuality than that
skill with which nature has endowed us.
Browning acknowledges the phenomenon in
"One Word More," in noting the dissatisfac-
tion of the artist with his proper medium: —

" Does he paint? He fain would write a poem, -=-
Does he write? He fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist's,
Once and only once, and for one only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow."
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The Tyranny of Talent

The psychological experience described is
more fundamental than its application in the
poem merely to love and a lady.

The harshness of a controlling talent is
severe in restricting us not alone to what we
can do well, but to what we can do best. If
we paint, we must not only not write a poem,
but we must not attempt a picture different
from our best; if we write, we must continue
to write in the type and the tone of our first
successful experiment. The chef may long
to be an astronomer, but not only must he
stick to his flesh-pots, but if, in the gusto of
some early egg-beating, he has stumbled upon
the omelet superlative, he must continue to
furnish the world with omelets, no matter if
eggs become for him an utter banality, and
no matter bow his fancy be seething with
voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or
super-sheep.

The world is too much against us if we try
to lay down the burdens the task-master
Talent has imposed. The successful man be-
longs to the public: he no longer belongs to
himself. Talent, tried and proved and ac-
claimed, is too strong for us; we continue its
savorless round, against all our inward pro-
test. We are its slaves, and through the ami-
ability ineradicable in most bosoms, the slaves

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also of our admiring kinsfolk and friends and
public; most of all, perhaps, the slaves of
our own self-doubt, for possibly after all they
are right, possibly we are justly the chattels
of Talent, and not of that whispered self
of the air, taunting, teasing us, "What you
have done is sordid, is savorless! Come with
me to attempt the unexplored!" This desire
denied is both acknowledgment that all our
lordly labeled triumphs may have had a false
acclaim, and is also a protest against all mun-
dane and mortal valuations. Our unshackled
ego, scorning things done that took the eye
and had the price, seems to have the truer
voice. Is not art itself the assurance that we
are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of
a serene domain where the unaccomplished is
forever the only thing worth accomplishing?

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XIII

The Woman Who Writes

I OFTEN wonder how other women write.
Workers in art material are chary of re-
vealing processes that might save other work-
ers wasted effort and vain experiment, or,
better yet, provoke challenge still more con-
ducive to success. I venture to believe that
any woman's literary product is a matter of
constant, and often desperate, compromise
between writing and living; and some ex-
amination into the wherefore of this fact may
throw light on the nature of writing processes,
if not also on the nature of woman processes.
Since there are scant data for analyzing the
methods of other women writers, I give only
my own, the experiment and experience of a
woman who has chosen to earn a living as a
literary free lance.

Such conclusions must necessarily be per-
sonal and practical, pretending to no theories
except those made by immediate need. Driven
to earn to-day's bread and butter, I really
have no time to study the superiority of pre-
historic woman in the struggle for existence.

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Nor can I give undivided attention to the
achievements of my sex as promised by the
feminist millennium, when my 9 a.m. prob-
lem is to write a story that shall please
some editor, presumably male. I do not know
whether or not woman's intellect is the equal
of man's; I know only that mine is not.

While observation teaches me that every
woman worker may gain by adopting to a
certain degree the methods of men, the fem-
inist promise of an eventual equal productive-
ness is to me a promise barren, if true. So far
as I can see, individual men and women have,
alike, just so much vitality. If women devote
this vitality to doing what men do, they will
have just so much less to devote to being what
women are. As a writer I aspire to write a
book; as a woman I shall forever prefer to be
a person rather than a book.

In an examination into the psychology and
methods of the woman writer, two things
should be clearly kept in mind. The first is
that of all professions open to both sexes,
writing should furnish the most reliable con-
clusions in regard to the relative accomplish-
ment of men and women; for from Sappho's
day to ours a woman has been as free to write
as a man. Life is the only university in which
a writer can be trained, and that univer-
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sity has always been strictly coeducational.
Neither have there ever been any restric-
tions, commercial or social, to bar a woman's
way to the literary career. It follows that
any restrictions that exist must be imposed,
not from without, but from within, must be
due to the nature of the creature, physical,
mental, and spiritual.

The second fact not to be forgotten is that
of all the professions practiced by women
writing is the one most intimately affected
by a woman's personal life and philosophy.
It is far easier to detach yourself from your
own dailyness for the purposes of music,
painting, or science, than to separate your-
self from the book you are writing, which is
necessarily self-expressive. Consequently a
woman's literary productiveness is far more
precariously dependent upon her peace of
mind than any other form of professional ac-
tivity. There are too many mute Miltons,
too easily silenced, among my sex; but on the
other hand — a fact equally due to the fem-
inine fusion of living and writing — history
has shown, perhaps will always show, that
woman's most valid intellectual achievement
is in literature.

As a writer-worker, I have found no way
of getting even with my limitations except by

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frankly shouldering them. The body my soul
bears upon its back is a heavier burden to
carry than a man's, and I find I cannot ac-
complish the pilgrimage if I give up my own
little jog-trot for a man's stride. All that hap-
pens is that I lose my breath, and break my
back, and have to lie down by the roadside to
be mended. But when I do keep my own
small pace, I have time and strength to pick
a few fence-row flowers, too fine and frail and
joyous for any striding man to notice.

I turn sharply from my own figures of
speech to Mr. W. L. George's airier fancies,
to the most vital facts of feminine existence
brushed so lightly by the masculine intelli-
gence that it can say, " in passing, that we
do not attach undue importance to woman's
physical disabilities. ... I suspect that this is
largely remediable, for I am not convinced
that it is woman's peculiar physical condi-
tions that occasionally warp her intellect: it
is equally possible that a warped intellect
produces unsatisfactory physical conditions.
Therefore if, as I firmly believe that we can,
we develop this intellect, profound changes
may with time appear in these physical con-
ditions."

My own warped intellect, belonging to a
woman who must write stories for a living,
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points out that, if it has taken aeons of dif-
ferentiation under the guidance of Dame Na-
ture to accomplish my own personal physical
disabilities, I can hardly afford to wait for
aeons of differentiation under the guidance of
Mr. George to accomplish my own personal
physical freedom.

Looking at things as they are, I find my
body constantly pushing upon my work; but
it is possible to treat a body with a certain
humorous detachment. It is possible to say
to yourself, this is a headache that you have,
don't do it the honor of letting it become a
heartache, your own or — far more fateful
peril — your heroine's. It is quite practicable
for a woman to live apart from her body even
when it hurts, quite practicable to give it sane
and necessary attention, while keeping the
soul separate from it, exactly as if she were
ministering to some tired baby; this course is
one of the only two solutions I have ever dis-
covered of the problem of preserving a work-
er's spirit in a woman's body. The other solu-
tion lies in the frank concession to certain
physical incapacities as the price one pays for
certain psychological capacities.

A woman's talent both for being a woman
and for being a writer is measured by the
force and the accuracy of her intuitions. My

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intuitions in regard to the people about me,
when duly transformed into story-stuff, have
a definite market value. If I did not pos-
sess them, I could not conceive, make, or sell
a single manuscript. Supersensitive impres-
sions necessitate the supersensitive channels
by which a woman's outer world connects with
her inner one. If I will have woman's intui-
tions, I must have my woman's nervous sys-
tem. So long as I think telepathy the best of
sport, I must consent to give house-room to
its delicate machinery, even to the extent of
keeping cool when that machinery gets out
of order and buzzes with neuritis or neuralgia
or insomnia. The additional fact is only super-
ficially paradoxical, that when the woman
worker takes the disorder of her nervous ma-
chinery thus philosophically, it is much less
likely to have any disorder.

The fallibility of a woman's body seems
beyond disputing. If a man does dispute it,
it is because he never had one; if a woman
disputes it, well, personally, if I can't be as
strong as a man I should like to be as honest
as one! The fallibility of a woman's intellect
is a little more open to argument, but only a
little. I keep to my primary assumption that
I am not trying to see further than my nose,
or to voice any observations but my own.
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Among the men and women of history and
among those of my vicinity, I cannot see that
woman's brain is the equal of man's in orig-
inality, in concentration, or in power of sus-
tained effort. As a worker, I find that I can
write for only a few hours and no more: be-
yond that limit stands disaster for the woman,
and, far more perilous, disaster for the writ-
ing. In regard to my brain as in regard to my
body, the primary condition of doing my
work at all lies in recognizing the truth that I
can't do so much work, or do it so well, as a
man.

In all matters that can be weighed or meas-
ured, a man's endowment is superior to a
woman's; but, on the other hand, a woman's
endowment consists in the quality and the
quantity of an imponderable something that
cannot be weighed or measured. The chief
difficulty about analyzing a woman's brain
is that it is so hard to separate her brain from
the rest of the woman, whereas men are put
together in plainly discernible pieces — body,
mind, and soul.

The perfection of a woman's intellect de-
pends upon the perfection of its fusion with
her personality. A w^ati ^mounts to most
intellectually whon §he amounts to still more
personally. She e^jinQt move in pieces like a

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man, or like an earthworm. It needs the whole
woman, acting harmoniously, to write. A
man can retire into his brain and make a
book, and a good one, leaving all the rest of
his personality in confusion; but a woman
must put her whole house in order before she
can go off upstairs into her intellect and write.
It follows that a woman's artistic achieve-
ment is for her a harder job than a man's
achievement is for him, which would make
the other fact — namely, that the woman's
book when written is never so great as the
man's — seem additionally cruel, if we could
not discern that the best of women writers
have, in attaining that best, reached not one
result but two: impelled to clean all her spirit's
house before she can feel happy to write in
it, a woman writer achieves both a home that
people like to visit and a book that people
like to read. Is it not true of all the greatest
women authors that we think of them as
women before we think of them as authors?

Of fiction-makers in our own tongue the
greatest man is Shakespeare and the greatest
woman is Jane Austen. In personal revela-
tion both were signally reserved, the woman
the more so, seeing that she did not even burst
into the hieroglyphics of a sonnet sequence;
but of the two our first thought of the woman
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is "dear Jane," and of the man, "dear Rosa-
lind" — or Beatrice or Mercutio. A man,
possessing a separable intellect and an imag-
ination so original that it can sometimes cre-
ate what he personally is little capable of ex-
periencing, may sometimes write one thing
and be another; but not so a woman. On the
other hand, has any woman ever attained such
greatness that, at the mention of her name,
we think of the books she wrote before we
think of the woman she was?

It is true that professional women who
direct their toil on the conviction that a
woman's brain is of the same quality as a
man's sometimes produce work that approx-
imates a man's, in quantity. But sober ob-
servation of such women does not make me
want to be one. I see them too often pay-
ing the penalty of being lopped and warped.
Again I cannot see that, while such women at-
tain their Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s and LL.D.'s,
they ever attain the highest rank in literature.
Imaginative writing seems to demand inex-
orably that a woman writer be inexorably a
woman. On the other hand, I have reached
as a brain-worker the conclusion that, while
my head is different in substance from a
man's, I get most work out of it when I copy
a man's mental methods. My brain is a vague

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and volatile mass, shot through with fancies,
whimseys, with flashes of intuitive and illu-
minative wisdom, and it is a task surpassingly
difficult to hold all this volatility, this ver-
satility, to the rigors of artistic expression, to
the stern architectonics of fiction. To the
degree that a woman shall succeed in impos-
ing upon the matter of her intellect the method
of a man's intellect, to that degree shall her
work show the sanity and serenity of univer-
sal, and sexless, art. •

To impose upon a woman's intellect a
man's discipline and detachment is excellent
in theory; it is staggering in practice. Con-
vention and his own will make a man's time
his own. A woman's genius is for personal-
ity, or achievement within herself; a man's is
for work, or achievement outside of himself.
Now it takes time to be a person, and it takes
other people. A real woman's life is meshed
in other people's from dawn to dark. These
strands of other lives are to her so vital and
precious that for no book's sake will she ever
break them, yet for any book's sake she must
disentangle them. A woman writer's life is a
constant compromise, due to the fact that if
she does not live with her fellows, she will not
have anything to write, and that if she does
not withdraw from them, she will not have
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time to write anything. I do not know how
other writing women manage their time. I
know that to attain four hours a day at my
desk means that I must be revoltingly stern
with myself, my family, and my friends. One
pays a price for retirement, but one need not
pay too heavily. A solution lies in retaining
those relations that mean real humanity,
while cutting off those that mean only so-
ciety: I do not play bridge, but I do play with
children.

Of course, it always seems plausible to
solve the problem of time to one's self by run-
ning off to some strange place, but this never
works very well. The reason is that such
isolation is sure to prove evanescent, so that
you have to keep packing your trunk and
moving on to new exile, because human ten-
drils are so strong and stealthy that they
push their way through the thickest walls you
can build, and twine themselves, wherever
you hide, about the fingers that want to
write. In order to write a love-story of your
own invention, you run away from some
friend's too insistent love-story at home, and
the first thing you know you are deep in the
love-affairs of your poor little chambermaid.
You escape home worries only to have some
stranger's troubles batter down your hotel

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door. You might as well stay at home and
put up with the truth, that if you care enough
about people to wish to write of them, you
will care enough for people to wish to live
with them, abroad no less than at home.
Besides, boarding is bleak and blighting. If
I were a boarding woman, presently I should
feel too chilly to wish to write; my fancies and
my fingers would be too numb for expression.
I need a home with its big warm peace and its
little warm frictions before I can feel cozy
enough to want to chat with a pen.

There is a somewhat different alternative
to home existence; I have heard of communi-
ties duly arranged for the requirements of
writers, where they enjoy a kind of clublike
privacy and security from interruption. But
are not such communities confined to the near-
great? Are real writers any more than real
persons attracted by such an abnormal exist-
ence? Writers who shun life and people are
exactly the sort that life and people shun.
Personally, I run away from an author when-
ever I hear one coming. Of the really great
ones, I am desperately afraid, and of the not-
so-great ones, far more so.

Writer communities imply too much of the
placard. I wish I might never have to dangle
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my profession on a label. I am always embar-
rassed when I am forced blatantly to expose
it — for example, to the frank questions of the
doctor's secretary, or of a customs official.
"Profession?" they ask, and I cringe before
the admission, "I am a writer." I don't feel
ladylike when I say the words. On such occa-
sions I would give my entire remuneration for
an "Atlantic" essay to be able to say, "I am
a laundress."

Personally, I am only too glad to forget
that I am a Grub-Streeter, if only other peo-
ple would forget. No matter how obscurely
one has ever appeared in print, one pays the
penalty of the pinnacle ever after. Surely one
is no more responsible for the tendency of
one's talents than for the color of one's hair.
I write because I have found it my best way
of making a living, — and also because I
can't help it; therefore why cannot people
accept me as simply as if I were a dressmaker?
I should be embittered by the curious attitude
of people toward the literary calling, if it were
not as funny as it is puzzling. Once, at a tea,
an imposing matron hurtled from the front
door to my corner, crying out, "Can you talk
as you write? If so, please do!" I was dumb
with discomfort for the rest of the after-
noon.

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The subject of attitude toward the writer
is worthy of digression and topical analysis,
for there is a difference among friends, fam-
ily, and general acquaintance. Now, it is not
often that I wish to talk as I write, but the
occasions when I do, while rare, are painful
and urgent. It is precisely on these occasions
that my friends fail me. Essays are a long
while in being born, and while they are in
process I would give much for some one with
whom to talk them over. It is not after a
thing is published that a writer needs appre-
ciation: it is before, and especially before it
is written. For twenty friends who will loy-
ally enjoy anything I write, I cannot count
three who will listen when I talk. Yet the
ideas are exactly the same whether uttered by
pen or tongue. No friend is so valuable as one
ready to attend and sympathize during the
incubation and parturition of an idea. And
yet the majority, knowing too well the au-
thor's temperamental uncertainties, are per-
haps to be forgiven their preference to wait
until the editorial christening. So much big-
ger to most minds is print than person. A
writer's best friends are prone to treat her
with the affectionate inattention they would
give to a Blind Tom. Yet I would rather my
friends never listened to me, than that they
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always did; it is much cozier to be considered
an idiot than an oracle.

If friends are prone to take the writing
more seriously than they take the writer, her
family, on the contrary, share her throes too
intimately to take their poor sufferer lightly.
Few authors experience the popular fallacy of
a doting family audience. A shuddering appre-
hension of the potential effect upon editor
and reader makes kinfolk intensely critical.
The agonies to which any sympathetic house-
hold is subjected when one member of it is
writing a book are such as to make them
question whether any book is worth the price
of its creation. A writer's family also lives in
the constant, but usually groundless, fear of
being written up. There is both humor and
pathos when dear Granny retires into a cor-
ner with some foible she knows you admired
in infancy. Relatives are always a trifle un-
easy in the presence of the chiel amang us tak-
in' notes. I doubt if any success quite com-
pensates for the discomfort of being blood-kin
to a writer. True, a family can sometimes
be discovered passing the book or magazine
around among the neighbors, but they don't
wish you to catch them with it in their own
hands. Friends and family are alike in their
complexity of attitude, being insistent that

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other people shall admire you, but afraid of
making you conceited if they admire you
themselves. The danger of conceit can be
safely entrusted to editors and reviewers, not
to mention the disillusion that sickens any
author on comparing the finished book with
the fancied one.

But if a writer is comfortably without
honor among her intimates, she is more than
honored by the attention accorded by chance
acquaintance. The attitude of the average
person toward print as print is enigmatic.
Not all people place the pen on a pedestal,
but all regard the penman as somehow dif-
ferent. I once essayed retirement at a little
village hotel. I was promptly established in a
room made sacred by the previous occupancy
of another lady author. Her name I had never
before heard, although I heard it daily during
my sojourn. Her sole producible work was a
railroad advertisement of some remote gar-
den-spot in California, but it had been enough
to confer a halo, as well as to win more sub-
stantial reward, for I afterwards found out
that, solely for the literary aroma she diffused,
the lady had been allowed to remain two
years without paying a cent of board. Un-
fortunately I did not discover the fact until
I had paid my own board for two months.
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The incident disproves the charge that the
United States has no popular respect for the
fine arts.

Print is prone to induce curious revela-
tions from strangers. You write, perhaps, a
story that tries to be true to simple human
emotions, and the next thing you know, some-
body in Idaho is writing you all about his
wife or baby. It is touching, but quaint. I
have come to be a little suspicious of letters
from strangers that purport to be simple let-
ters of appreciation. I used to be very much
flattered by them until my brief notes of
thanks drew forth such unexpected replies.
It appeared that the writers of the letters
were writers of other works as well; they were
sending these to me forthwith; would I
kindly read and comment? My experience
is, I gather, not unique. A writer-friend,
whose published poetry is marked by peculiar
sanity, has received from more than one un-
known source effusions so bizarre that they
can emanate from nothing .but a madhouse.

It is easy to silence by silence these unseen
acquaintance, but others nearer by demand
tact. Among these are people who tell me
stories they want me to tell. They never can
understand why I don't use the material. As
a matter of fact, raw romance striking enough

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to impress the lay mind is much too strik-
ing for a writer's employment. Truth that is
stranger than fiction is what every story-teller
must avoid if he is to write stories true enough
to be read.

What I more and more discover is that nine
tenths of the people one meets want to write,
that seven tenths of them have at some time
tried, and that not more than one tenth of
them perceive why they have failed. Since
they think the impulse to write more dis-
tinctive than its accomplishment, and since
they feel that they have the impulse in all
its glory, they regard with a half-contemptu-
ous envy the person who actually does write.
They regard creation as purely inspirational,
and look askance at a worker who goes to her
desk every morning like a machine. For all
I know, they are right. A good many people
think that the only reason they are not writ-
ers is that they never tried to be. Others
think they would have written if they had
only been taught how, if they had had the
opportunity of certain courses in college.
Still others think there must be some charmed
approach to an editor's attention. Who in-
troduced me, they frankly ask. When peo-
ple talk like this it requires some self-control
to repress my conviction that any person who
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could have written would have written, and
my knowledge that the only introduction I
ever had to any editor was made by my own
manuscripts.

Friends, family, and general acquaintance
have, I find, one impulse in common, the de-
sire always to hound down the autobiographic.
They read, beam brightly, look up at me, and
say, "Oh, here is Aunt Sarah's chicken-pen!"
Actually it is an old well I. once saw in Brit-
tany. "Oh, here is the story of old Mr. Gres-
ham at his grandnephew's funeral. Don't
you remember I showed you Elsie's letter
about it ? " I never saw the letter, never heard
of old Mr. Gresham, and the chapter in ques-
tion describes the antics of a four-year-old
at his father's wedding.

"Here is Saidie Lippincott to the life!"
I gasp, "Who is Saidie Lippincott?"
"Don't you remember you met her at Rose
Earle's tea when you visited me four years
ago?"

There is no possession people are so un-
willing to let one have as an imagination. In
private, friends will tear a book to shreds to
discover some portrait they can recognize;
and in the case of authors famous enough to
be dead, critics rake the ground wherever
they have trod in an effort to prove that the

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folk of their fancy were drawn from the earth
rather than the air. There seems no means
of convincing a reader that in a writer's head
are constantly a thousand faces he has never
seen or heard of, all subtle with story, all
begging for a book, and all so real that they
often make his daily waking seem a dream.

There is no denying that there is autobiog-
raphy in all fiction, but the relation of the
two is not so superficial as the mere introduce
tion of facts and of characters from one's daily
life. The actual relation of experience and
its expression is deep and intricate, and,
especially for the woman writer, pervasive.
As one must adjust one's work to a feminine
body, to a feminine brain, and to distinctly
feminine social relations, so one must take
into account as still more determinative a
woman's spiritual characteristics. However
potent the impulse to write, the impulse to
live is deeper. I have dwelt on the negative
side of this problem, the uselessness of fleeing
to strange places to escape other people's
burdens; but it is impossible to over-empha-
size the positive side, the difficulties of stay-
ing at home with the burdens that Provi-
dence has provided. However intense the
joys and sorrows of the people the woman
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creates, the joys and sorrows of the people
she loves will be still more intense. It needs
both poise and vitality to be equal to the de-
mands both of fancy and of fact. The mere
external tangle of hours and seasons that
any human relations necessitate is nothing
compared with the spiritual tangle of one's
sympathies. The instinct to soothe and suc-
cor and the instinct to think and write meet
in a daily, an hourly, variance. Heart and
head are equally insistent in their demands,
and equally vengeful if unsatisfied. Books
cry to be written, and people cry to be loved,
and to whichever one I turn a deaf ear, I am
presently paying the penalty of a great un-
rest and discontent. To preserve the balance
of attention between the needs of her head
and the needs of her heart is the biggest prob-
lem any woman writer faces. I have discov-
ered no ultimate solution ; it is rather a mat-
ter of small daily solutions, in which at one
time we sacrifice the friend to the book, and
at another the book to the friend.

Yet in any crucial choice a real woman
chooses living rather than literature. My
brain itself approves this yielding of intellect
to emotions for the very simple reason that,
if I don't thus yield, the emotions denied will
avenge themselves on the brain, and the

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book I write will be unnatural because I my-
self am unnatural.

Once I thought it impossible to write when
people about me were in distress : I proposed
to myself to wait until things should settle
down. I perceived that things never do settle
down; that for women who have human affec-
tions, there will always be somebody some-
where to worry about. It is rather inspiring
to be a woman, because it is so difficult. With
the winds blowing from evfery direction at
once, one must somehow steer a course that
will reveal alike to the reader who knows
one's book and to the friend who knows one's
heart, a halcyon serenity.

A relative detachment from her own liv-
ing is as necessary for a woman writer as
an absolute detachment is stultifying. Since
for a woman expression is fused with experi-
ence, clean hands and a pure heart are for
her the fundamental demands of art, and
this fact means that she must be constantly
scouring off her sense of humor with spirit-
ual sapolio before she can effectively handle
a pen. Be sure her philosophy will find her
out in her book far more clearly than in a
man's.

The natural fusion of a woman's brain with
her emotions, resisted, leads to intellectual
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weakness; accepted, leads to intellectual
strength. In the history of literature George
Sand is the great example of a woman who
won success by the masculine solution of
detachment from experience, and Jane Aus-
ten, the great example of a woman who won
success by the feminine solution of identifi-
cation with her own dailyness.

I am inclined to think the latter by far
the greater artist, just as I am inclined to
think that in literature rather than in any
other form of mental activity will always
be found woman's highest intellectual achieve-
ment, for the simple reason that woman's
genius consists in personality, and for the
expression of personality words are the only
adequate medium. Jane Austen's example
is the great encouragement for the woman
who wishes to write without ceasing to be a
simple everyday woman. Jane Austen was
capable of a detachment that enabled her
to write books that give no hint of the
thunder of the Napoleonic wars even when
she had two brothers on fighting ships. She
was capable of an identification with her
surroundings that enabled her to write nov-
els of universal humanity and eternal artis-
try and to keep right on being everybody's
aunt at the same time. She was sane and

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humorous in her novels because she was sane
and humorous out of them. She achieved
fame because she had first achieved person-
ality. Still, her fame is only a thin frail fire
set beside the effulgence of a dozen men of
her time.

Yet I would rather have been Jane Austen
than Shelley or Wordsworth or Keats. It is
perfectly just that men's books should be
greater than women's, because men are will-
ing to pay the price. Not to write "Mac-
beth" would I willingly give up an afternoon's
romp with a baby. As a woman I reckon my
spirit's capital, not in terms of accomplish-
ment, but in terms of my own joy, and a
baby brings me more joy than a book.

Men ought to write better than women
because they care more; in a way women who
write have the more impersonal outside-of-
themselves impulsion, because inside of them-
selves they don't care. I acknowledge the
urge of writing and I am willing up to a cer-
tain point to pay by means of a vigorous men-
tal discipline and a certain self-saving from
useless self-spending, but I don't pretend
that writing satisfies me. Something de-
scends upon me and says, "Write," and shakes
me like a helpless kitten until I do write; but
it's a relief when the shaking is over, and I
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am left to the merrier business of merely
being myself. In other words, I am a writer
because I can't help it, but I am a woman
because I choose to be.

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XIV

^Picnic ^Pictures

HER white house is the same, with a dif-
ference. It was always a house fitted to
the person like a garment, a friendly house
with peace in the corners, a house warm with
sun or firelight; yet I think we always used
the house merely as a starting-place for pic-
nics, for running away into the out-of-doors
with a well-stocked basket. We are at best
only reformed dryads, my friend and I, and
I am not even reformed. I think perhaps
that it was in like manner that we used our
two selves, merely as a starting-point for pic-
nics, for the leap into the infinite, the chal-
lenging of space and time, the tossing of stars
like play-balls from one to the other, always
with the joy of the word shaping on the
tongue to the gleam in a friend's eye. We are
lovers of words, I and she. True we also had
talk in the library, dusked with books, dead
men's spirits packed shoulder to shoulder on
the shelves. There was brave firelight in the
library, and quiet candles, and there was also
Xerxes. The great gray Persian curled on one
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corner of the big desk. Even asleep he dom-
inated the home in his sole masculinity. Yet
to me he was sexless and sphinxlike except
when he forsook his Oriental calm for strange
gambols in the white moonlight, a bound-
ing gray shape of a tiger grace. Sometimes
Xerxes rose and stretched as if our conversa-
tion bored him, sometimes his great purring
drowned out the Occidental flippancy of our
chat. He was more king than cat, and he al-
ways made me a little uncomfortable, that
Xerxes. To-day he is not dead but deposed.
His place on the desk is usurped by a sturdy
box of cigars.

However happily we might talk in the li-
brary we always knew we were better without
a roof, for in the blood of the born picnicker
there is something that must always be run-
ning, dancing, flying. Out-of-doors, there
were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk
delved too deep, and the pine-tops to fill all
pauses with quiet music. We were the bet-
ter picnickers because we lived for the most
part in life's schoolroom. We counted our
picnic days and sorted them into due order
of excellence, some better, some not quite so
merry, yet all very good. But lately I had
begun to wonder about the picnics, for the
difference in the white, hill-girdled house is a

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husband. When our friends many we al-
ways wonder about the picnics, for sorrow is
always a third comrade to hold two friends'
hands the tighter, and to keep their feet more
closely in step; it is happiness that may sever
and un-self people.

This, our first married picnic, dawned as
brisk and bright as any. The master is not
with us. He departs each morning for a mys-
terious place called "The Works." That is
something I have always noticed in husbands*
that tendency to go forth to "The Works."
Somehow no matter how hard women may
toil for their daily bread, they never seem to
belong to "The Works" of the world. The
white house bustles with picnic preparations.
It has to bustle when Jennie is in it. Jennie?
Well, Jennie might be called the steam-engine
at the middle of the merry-go-round. Some
day I think the world will grow wise enough
to stop talking about the servant question,
and begin to study the philosophy that is still
often to be found going about wrapped in a
maid's cap and apron. Jennie, a little person
quick of foot, bounces up and down like a
merry ball, and cries to the blue May morn-
ing while she butters sandwiches, "Picnic
time has come again! Picnic time has come
again!" Yet I never heard of Jennie's going
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on a picnic; do people ever know, I wonder,
how much of other people's unselfishness must
go to the making of anybody's Eden?

The hall rocks to the bouncings and bark-
ings of Mac, for he, too, feels picnic in the air.
Mac is a newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare,
ready tied beneath a tree to carry us over the
hills and far away. When Adam came to this
Eden, he brought his animals with him, a
method much better than the Scriptural one,
for it must have been a strain on any honey-
moon, that influx of indiscriminate elephant
and dinosaur, cormorant and anteater, and
what not. The animals here were carefully
chosen, Mac, the shaggy, clumsy, warm-
hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a
lady of the old South, having all such a lady's
charm and grace and fundamental loyalty
touched with just the dash of deviltry con-
sidered meet to spice the masculine palate. It
is with the clatter of Mac's ecstatic barking
as he plunges before Peggy's light hoofs that
we go driving forth toward the blue, hill-
swept horizon.

There is a tentative venturesomeness about
my friend's driving, for horsemanship with
her is a recent accomplishment, and a proud
one, to the zest of which Peggy contributes
with a pricking of ears and a graceful dip to

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the side of the road before every motor-car.
Mac trots briskly in front or behind, or to the
side. His path through life is one of friendly
detours. He will never accomplish any great
deeds in dogdom. He is one of the simple
souls unconscious of their magnetism. There
is not an animal by the roadside that does n't
come ambling up to his genial little nose.
Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily
across the pasture to chat with him at the
bars, and no dog, big or little, fails to wish
Mac good-morning.

It is the kind of morning for good wishes
both for dogs and men. Knotted old farmers,
seeing our picnic faces and picnic basket, grin
and twinkle, sharing the May sunshine. The
hills are a dim blue against a sky still softer.
Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than
green, are starred with bluets. Far off there,
below a shaggy stretch of pines, is a field so
golden with dandelions that it quivers as if
held by midsummer heat.

We don't know where we are going; that is
always the charm of our picnics, to follow the
will of the road. It carries us past a sawmill in
the wood. Its stridency and the tang of fresh
sawdust strike sharp across the air fragrant
with fern. Then the road is off again across
the open, cleaving farms with their broad
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greening fields. The meadowlarks ring out
their calls to us. The bobolinks dart and dive
and sing. I turn to my companion in sudden
question: "Now that you are married to a
woodsman, do you know anything more
about birds ?"

"Oh, no," she answers easily, "we know
only the nice birds"; thus reassuring me that
in her company I need fear, no more than of
old, to meet any but the best bird society,
robins and blackbirds and orioles and the
other long-established families, and reassur-
ing me also as to my fear that the one left be-
hind at "The Works" might prove to be one
of these bugaboo birdmen, of ..all beings the
most subtly superior. In fact, it is very dif-
ficult to extract good conversation from any
kind of human encyclopedia, ornithological
or other.

Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are
snowed over with white, but the apple blos-
soms are unopened, turning to a deep rose
amid the pale-green leaves. The orchards are
nearly human in their individuality, whether
they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy
and gnarled and steadfast, or a band of
little budding baby trees toddling up a hill.
There are no great waters in this countryside,
but many little glinting brooks, pattering

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downhill beside our wheels, then meandering
through meadows beneath their bushy wil-
lows. We are minded to follow a brook and
let it lead us to perfect picnic. It leads us, of
course, up a hill and up, away from all farms,
all valleys, into a deep woods road, hushed
and strange, and at last beckons us aside from
the road itself, with a twinkle of white birch
stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and
amber.

It takes a long time to tie and blanket
Peggy while I sit dreaming in the dappled
shade beside the musical rush of water,
haunted by my friend's own song that once
set all this woodland madness to elfin rhythms.
But my mood is interrupted by the thumping
down of the stout picnic basket. She is smil-
ingly tolerant of my dryad whimseys, but for
herself, nowadays, she wishes to unpack that
basket and get settled. It is for me also, per-
haps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other
dryad turned domestic; for me, brook water
still has power to turn me dizzy and to make
my heart stop beating.

It is the same basket we used to carry, but,
like the house, it has a difference. There is a
great object concealed in ebony leather, and
it is called the "wap-eradicator." The term
is profoundly masculine, for a "wap" is some
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evil-eyed foreigner who might disturb our
picnic privacy, and his eradicator is a pistol.
There is also a marvelous jackknife which I
pause in unpacking to examine. It again is
no lady's toy, seeing that it has not only
all the blades a lady might require, but in
addition a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a
tack-puller and a can-opener. There is stout
enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we
always used to carry china, feminine and
fragile. Food, much of that, — but then we
always did take food, for I have noticed that
poets need a deal of victualing. In fact, roast
beef is about the best thing you can do for
anybody's imagination. One packet I myself
put in for old sake's sake, despite her laughter,
a yellow envelope packed with her typed
poetry. "We'll never look at it," she said,
and she generally knows. She pulls forth now
some scribbled tablets, skeleton stories of my
own, "Your little deedles," she designates
them in genial contempt, and plants the cream
jar upon them.

Presently she is off to gather fagots for
the fire, admonishing my absent-mindedness,
"Don't let Mac eat the food before we do." I
note how much handier she has grown in all
wood-lore. To-day the fire needs no coaxing,
also it's a much smaller fire than we used to

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build. We used to have a scorching splutter
for a wee bit of coffee. This fire goes briskly
and to the point, showering us now and then
with cinders, yet on the whole well-behaved.
In other days we toasted our bacon on forked
sticks, but there's a fine frying-pan now, with
rings to thrust a rod into, tightening it with
twigs. Bacon and eggs sizzle merrily, and the
coffee-kettle boils its cover off. We sit smut-
cheeked and zestful, and exhibit a great ca-
pacity for sandwiches. There is much com-
placency in our manners. Her coffee, she re-
marks, "has seven kinds of sticks in it, but is
perfectly potable." The fire, that low, leap-
ing ruddiness against a gray boulder, is the
best fire she "ever personally conducted."
As for me, there is plenty of chuckle in me,
too, but I am thinking, when shall we begin
to talk, for was that not what we always went
to the woods for? Somehow, what with build-
ing fires, and brewing and frying, with eating
and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to
eat and drink, there has not been time for
talking. That will come later, when we have
packed away the sandwiches we could not
eat, and given Mac his drink from our emp-
tied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps of
sugar. Then surely at last we shall talk,
about poems and stories, and all things writ-
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able, and all things livable. Sometimes I
think she guesses what I am waiting for and
regards me with a twinkle, while she moves
about light-footed, setting away our clutter.
But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched
in flickering shadow on the brown pine
needles; and I, the picnic place has caught
me again into its spell. Nowhere does spring
come stepping so delicately as in New Eng-
land. In other places there is more riot and
revelry in the carnival of bursting blossoms
and leaf. In New England spring has the
face of a girl nun. There are white violets in
our woods and white birch stems. The very
light has a quality soft and rare. The sky is
the Quaker ladies' own color. Across the
swirling water that leaps down the rock path,
the face of a hill rises high into the sky. It is
all gray boulder and brown, with a film of
pale green over all, touched here and there
by the dreamy white of the shadbush. Nearer
by, great boulders at the waterside below us
are moss-covered, and across them the dap-
pled shade of little leaves goes flickering.
The beautiful tree shapes are unhidden, gray
stems twining with brown. There is a satin
sheen in the rod of light that lines each trunk-
shaft turned to the sun. Just now, sailing
from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray of

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the hill opposite, there fluttered a white but-
terfly.

After a long time I touch the envelope
packed with poetry, and move it tentatively
toward my friend's hand. She shoves it
quietly aside. Drowsy though she is, she has
an eye open to watch Peggy's glossy brown
head tossing down there in an amber-lit
wood space, and to see that Mac does not
wake from his nap, where he lies only half
visible against the russet leaves he has chosen
to match his coat. Nowadays any soaring
talk may be interrupted by a hearty "Whoa,
Peggy!" or a "Down, Mac!" It is no poor
punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for
people whose feet have often ached from
treading the tree-tops.

She has tossed aside her poetry, but will
listen to my stories. I am eager to tell her
about all the new people in my brain. She
brushes the cobwebs from their heads and
from mine with all her old acumen, knowing,
in all the spacious sanities of the married
woman, that I need to write, while I, I know,
too, that she need not. If we did not, each
of us, understand, could there be any more
picnics? But the pauses grow longer, filled
with the voices of the water and the wood.
The air is warm and drowsy, and at last she is
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fast asleep, held close to the brown earth, and
I, the other one, sit straight, my back to a
stout pine, while my thoughts go wandering,
gazing in at Eden, at all Edens. Everybody's
path skirts so many Edens, of the women
friends married, and the men friends married.
Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful
of reflections. Looking at my friend lying
there asleep on brown pine needles, I know,
as every woman must know, that she will
never again need me in the old way, and, as
every woman must be, I am far too glad to
be sorry. The question for each of us, man
or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he, will
she, still come out sometimes into life's great
open and picnic with me? That all depends,
does it not? on the newcomer. If he, if she, is
a petty person, there are no more picnics. If
a man, moving in to possess all sky, all sea,
every crack and cranny of the universe, still
holds most sacred there that path of a wom-
an's past which she walked, alone, to come
to him, he will leave untouched all the little
sunny picnic places, for any man big enough
to deserve all a woman's past would be far
too big to desire it; is not just that the secret
of how to have picnics though married?

And still my thoughts go wandering, pass-
ing now from the "wap-eradicator" to all

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that lies back of it, of our need for it. How
fundamentally different the way in which we
must both regard that great black pistol lying
between us! To her it is a new toy, something
she has recently learned to shoot, and deeper,
truer, it is the symbol of a husband's protec-
tion, while I see beyond it that great fevered
army of the unemployed, those who work and
want, whose presence makes a weapon neces-
sary. In some way I cannot analyze, I know
that I am vaguely glad that I am on their side
of the fence; in both my work and play too
far away from them, perhaps, and too forget-
ful, still on their side of the ramparts of Eden,
in that strange great world where no one ever
is satisfied.

That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to
which no new poem has been added for many
a month, — will she ever write again, and
shall I be glad or sorry, I who know myself
how a woman's writing is made? Yet hers
is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the
song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is
men who have best put women into words,
men who have made the best bedtime lulla-
bies for children; women have been much too
happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman
with the gift of song, if she remembered, —
if she could set to music the purring of her
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kettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-ma-
chine, — how the sunny words might twinkle
on harder, stranger paths ! But if happy peo-
ple remembered, could they then be happy?
Oh, dear me, why must I be always asking
questions ? The wind is blowing, and against
that big frowning boulder a buttercup is bob-
bing in the sun : how many times a day one is
glad one does not have to be God, but only
has to know Him there, behind this sun-and-
shadow curtain we name Life!

But my friend is awake, measuring the time
of the master's home-going and ours. She is
up, and running down to the waterside. I see
her there, slender and tall, light-poised on a
stone. Beyond her the opposite hillside looms
high, green and gray. Above her ruddy head
a shadbush bends itself, russet and white like
her own woods-dress. As I look she tosses the
water from her cup, and it falls in a great arc
of sun-spray against the dusk of the woods.

The home-going is as glad as the going
forth, but quieter, with long shadows across
the grass. We pass pools where tall trees
stand with their feet in the water in the gold
light of late afternoon, and all the motion-
less brown water is bordered bright with
marsh-marigolds. We stop at a watering-
trough, and I must get out to undo Peggy's

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check-rein, and to keep a hand on Mac's collar
so that he will not tumble head foremost over
the high rail. I hand up a cup to the driver
seated, and we drink thirstily, all four of us.

One farm has been happy with a spring
paint-brush since our morning passing. Every
flower-pot, box, tripod, and that curiously
frequent flower-receptacle, the iron boiler, cut
in lengthwise section, has been coated with
dashing vermilion. Spring had got into their
bones on that farm.

Mac lags from time to time, and we have to
stop to lug and heave him into the wagon,
where he lies across our feet, a panting, rest-
less lap-robe of warm Airedale. Now a curious
social phenomenon occurs. The very dogs,
which in the morning had nosed Mac in
friendliest fashion, come forth and bark and
howl at him in his present eminence. It is the
old, old story of the proletariat protesting
against the plutocrat.

The green spring country is seamed by old
stone walls. I do not know why an old stone wall
has power to touch my pulses strangely, to set
stirring dreams long prisoned. It is some for-
gotten child association, I suppose, the feeling
that an old stonewall gives me, exactly akin, by
the way, to that of an old covered bridge, with
its magic of mystery-shod hoofs at midnight.
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Peggy's hoofs are swift, going home, and
the road, although the same, seems twice as
short as before. At one point we vary it,
cutting across country through a wood of
pines. Beneath the pines the earth is all
brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is
clear amber, except that at the far edge of the
grove there are bright gold gleams through
the distant tree stems. Above our heads the
color is not brown; it is that strange deep
gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart of
a pine tree where the branches meet the trunk.
We have not talked very much to-day, she
and I, but here no one could speak any words.
These seem the stillest woods in all the world.
We draw rein. Suddenly from out uttermost
silence there rings the chime of a thrush.

But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is
panting. Were the animals urgent just like
this, I wonder, when Adam and Eve longed to
listen to some archangel's voice?

It is Peggy's will that we get home. The
master is there before us, and at the barn.
That is another thing I have noticed about
husbands, when they are not at "The Works,"
they are likely to be at the barn, if there is
one. Jennie is flying about, singing to her
feet to keep them lively while she makes us a
dinner. Even when that meal comes I find

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I am stilt dreaming, for I was not ready to
come home. Afterward in the clear May
twilight we move forth to doorstep and lawn.
It is Peggy's hour for evening cropping. The
master leads her about. Every turn of her
head, every lift of her foot, is a movement of
grace. In the gathering twilight, soft and misty,
Peggy seems some beautiful horse stepping
delicately out of elfland. Mac is tugging at
the other end of her tether rope, and the mas-
ter is somehow strung between them.

The level meadows flow away before us.
The deepening blue of the sky softly puts out
the sunset. Suddenly, as at some signal, the
frogs begin to pipe from the meadow pool.
My friend crosses the dusky lawn to join
those others. She moves at Peggy's head in
her dim white dress. One star comes out.

Across their heads I see, hardly discernible,
the spires of the city, and its red earth-lights,
and somehow, although I know all its fever,
all its pain, I hear the far crying of its spirit to
my spirit, cry of innermost comradeship, the
call of Home. I rise now from my seat on the
doorstep, signal of good-night. She comes
flying to my side; of all the words she might
say, she chooses that best one, "It was our
very nicest picnic."

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The Farm Feminine

THERE are in my summer neighbor-
hood three gentlemen farmers who are
women. There is an implied distinction in the
implied definition. The three I have under
observation are quite different from those
women farmers who have shouldered their
husbands' acres when forced to do so by
widowhood or other marital disability. This
difference, among others that readily occur, is
primarily the same as that between all actual
and amateur farming, the difference between
those who grow up out of the soil and know
its tricks, and those who come to the soil
from another plane, and don't suspect it of
having any tricks. At any rate, the lady
farmers of our neighborhood farm because
they want to, not because they have to;
otherwise, perhaps, they would not be in our
neighborhood at all, although it is one of the
loveliest in all the land.

Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of
the South and the beautiful austerity of New
England lies Pennsylvania. This countryside

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is rich in mellow old farms, far retired from
railways. There are low, rolling hills and
woodsy back roads. Houses are set far up
grassy lanes, lined with trees. Doorways back
and front are deep in shade. Barns are big
and white, and spread broad wings over plen-
tiful harvesting. Houses are white, too, of
stucco or of stone, old, kindly, solidly built.
To these shady bricked porches, where the
roses clamber against gray-white walls, Wash-
ington's colonials might have come clatter-
ing up. Small wonder that women desiring
farms should desire just this deep-verdured
beauty, and no less wonder that the farms,
many good miles from market, should be so
abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to
surround herself with fields and fowls, may
readily choose her own particular frame and
setting.

The three have chosen, each according to
her heart's requirements. Lady One is the
lady of the flowers, and she is the youngest.
Her throat is round and white, nor beneath
the droop of her great garden hat is it too
much exposed to the sun. She wears gloves,
white ones and unique among garden gloves
because they fit. Her shoes, her kerchief, are
always freshly white, and her muslin dress of
soft shade, lavender or blue, or sprigged and
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flounced. She might have stepped forth from
fancy's gallery where we all keep pictures
hanging of gardens and of grandmothers.
She herself may be dreaming of just such a
portrait-picture. But don't think that she is
a drone because she is perhaps a dreamer.
There are no such flowers in thirty miles, and
flowers mean tireless toil; they take more
good soil-sweat than a whole field of potatoes.

She chose her farm to fit her, it had run
sadly seedy, but she retouched all its fading
picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame,
low, and white. Small grilled windows wink
with garret mysteries above the high porch
roof, and all is deep in shade and set far back
beyond low terraces with mossy flower urns
and steps of cracked flags. There are trim
green globes of box trees before the front door,
and to the left is her garden of flowers set
within a labyrinthine box hedge. Everywhere
are roses, roses, — starry little yellow blos-
soms, red, pink, white, roses whose very
names are fragrant: Flower of Fairfield, Perle
de Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d'Or, Crim-
son Globe, Killarney.

This lady's eyes are brown and too deep to
fathom because she is still too young to be
fearless. Her voice, her words, are sweet and
friendly, but her eyes do not see you, they see

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only roses, and in roses, perhaps, those deeper
mysteries all women see in all growing things;
her gloved hand can touch a rose as if it Were
a little live face.

Quite different, Lady Two and her farm.
Here all is bustle and clack. Chickens, pigs,
turkeys, kittens, ducks, puppies, calves occur
so frequently that every day is a birthday.
You could not associate Lady One with the
farmyard; you could not associate Lady Two
with anything else. True, her house has a
front doorway every whit as picturesque as
Lady One's, — a square porch where the
lilies-of-the-valley push up through ancient
bricks, and a great pine bears fruit of stars
every evening, — but Lady Two is not there
to see, for she is putting her chickens to bed.
It is out on the great back porch with its
pump and its grapevine lattice, on this porch
and on the slope to the big barns below, that
things happen. There is no rose garden. Lady
Two has flowers, it is true, in hearty demo-
cratic confusion and profusion; she loves
them, too, but without subtlety, watering them
and her tomato plants alike with the same
splashing hand. Her vegetable -garden is the
garden of her heart. She is a woman radiant
with a hoe.

Lady Two is tall and spare, tanned and
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cheery. Somewhere she has a family, comfort-
able and conventional, but somehow she has
managed to slip off to a farm, away from
them and all social claims, and thus at forty
she remains a hearty, rosy boy, with quick
hands, quick feet, and brown eyes full of zest.
The farm keeps her a little breathless; she is
on the jump all day, from the first imperative
call of hungry chicks to the small-hour bark-
ings of Gyp. It is nothing to hurry forth
from slumber with lantern and comforting
words to still her dog. If she should find that
Gyp had been barking at some prowling evil-
doer, she would not think first of her own
nerves, but of Gyp's.

Lady Two cares not for costume, choosing
merely the nearest and the handiest before
she hurries forth to her farm. Her hands are
marked by sun and serviceability; could you
succor a sick horse in gloves! In mud-streaked
denim, hatted and booted like a man, she
stalks the boggy pasture to recapture the
black turkey-hen, an errant lady, who, in
some atavistic dream, prefers to brood on an
empty nest in the swamp, exhibiting a truly
feminine propensity to combine a pleasing
wildness with a perilous wetness.

To Lady Two her farm means primarily
fowls. Down the slope below the kitchen

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porch they are housed with all modern im-
provements, in brooders and colony house,
and all manner of coops. Ducks waddle,
geese strut, guinea fowl go trip-trip on feet
too tiny. At feeding-time Lady Two is the
center of a feathered mass, cackling, peeping,
gobbling, quacking, creaking like rusty hinges
as guinea fowl do. She might be a mother
with a great group of happy, boisterous young-
sters. Sometimes she stoops to pick up and
inspect some tiny hurt chick. She croons to
it with brooding tenderness. Babies, she calls
the tiny things, and babies they are to her,
all the little newly-borns of her farm, whether
a pinky piglet, a calf that gambols awk-
wardly, a little turkey that must not get its
feet wet, a colt unsteady on stilt-legs, a beady-
eyed yellow duckling, a plunging puppy lost
among its own four legs, — babies alL

Not for roses, not for chicks, that grow,
both, beneath a fostering hand, did Lady
Three choose her farm. Roses and chicks she
has both in plenty, and tends them with her
own hands, adequately and happily, but
without absorption. She has outlived the
need for absorption, so that the twinkle in
her gray eyes is imperishable. She has also
outlived the need for varied costume. Hers
has the detachment and independence of
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uniform, always straight-cut, gray serge with
a straight-cut linen collar, and small crimson
tie. Her dress has all a man's superiority to
his exterior, but her choice of a farm reveals
nothing masculine in her spirit. Her great
farmhouse is built of brown stones set ir-
regularly in clear-seamed white. There are
big twin chimneys at right and left. There
is a white tablet beneath the eaves bearing
a date of Penn's time, but only the shell of
the house is old, within all is remade to a
mistress's liking. If in all women the root of
all impulse is to be always making something
that shall tangibly shape to the impress of
each woman's separate self, then Lady Three
chose neither flowers nor fowls, she chose to
create for herself a home. Much-traveled
herself, she found her farm far from beaten
paths, lost down a grassy lane where a brown
brook clatters and chuckles from out a hushed
woodland. A business woman, so-called, ex-
ecutive, successful, as any man, she chose,
ten years ago, at fifty, her far-off farm. Her
lawns are clear of litter as was her desk in
her counting-room. Her house is heated, wa-
tered, furnished in neatest and completest
comfort. Many electrical devices, and her
own ruddy health make her quite independ-
ent of kitchen itinerants not like the mistress

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inured to loneliness. Having read much, seen
much, done much, known much, in her fifty
years, she chose to spend the rest with her-
self, in her home, a home where every chair,
book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some
quick quaint taste, some humorous little phil-
osophy. It is a house warm with welcome,
but genially self-sufficient. Of the three, this
lady, wise and gray, is the only one who
really sees you, and listens; the other two
see only farm. Lady Three is not afraid to
live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or
alone indoors with her hearth fire. You can't
be afraid of the lonely wind when you have
long ago ceased to be afraid of yourself.

Thus my three lady farmers; and now that
question, Does their farming pay? All lady
farming depends entirely on the quality of its
male assistance. You cannot farm without
a man; it has been tried. Help is an ever-
present trouble, but the Lady of the Roses
has not found this out, because she is still too
young and too pretty. Whenever she steps
far from her roses, it is to look at her sky
rather than her soil. Unwitting she has power
to turn that brute species, Hired Man, into
a very knight of chivalry, jealous to guard
every blade of wheat that springs for her.
Busily binding, cutting, watering her roses,
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she never even sees her servitors; but they see
her, in all those frail fripperies of hers, while
in the summer evening they linger, blue-over-
ailed and bounden, just beyond her low hedge,
to hear the sound of her voice in its sweet,
absent responses. Her men know she does
not see them, but perhaps they think some
day she will perceive what tall corn she has,
what sleek cattle. Does her farming, there-
fore, pay? Yes, a little, which is as much as
can be said for most farming.

Quite different is the case with Lady Two.
She has her hired men and her hired boys,
big and little, and they all keep very busy,
watching her, and they keep still busier de-
manding that she watch them. She is a
cheery, desirable comrade for any toil, their
"Miss Katie," diminutive, both affectionate
and superior, showing small awe for their
tall boy mistress, in whose brisk capability
they have, however, pride. They constantly
call her to see them do it, whatever it is she
desires. "Miss Katie," "Miss Katie," re-
sounds from garden and furrow and hencoop.
They cannot detach a setting hen, or churn
the butter without her oversight, loudly bel-
lowed for. They are children demanding that
their mother shall watch their prowess at
play. She wonders why her farm does not

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pay; it is because of that expensive little
name of hers, because of her "Miss Katie."

Lady Three, — does her farm give her dol-
lar for dollar? Precisely that, and that is all
she asks of it. Her oversight is brief, ade-
quate. Men have always worked well for
her, they always will. She has the quiet
mistress-mastery that every man recognizes;
moreover, she has a bank account that every
man respects.

No, on the whole, lady farming does not
pay, if you reckon success not by desires, but
by dollars. From that point of view, only
those women farm successfully who have
at least once or twice in their lives possessed
a husband and assimilated his manner of
dealing with crops and with animals. Farm-
ing qua farming, that is essentially man's
work, but farming qua joy, that's a woman's
discovery. A man farmer is never fused with
his farm, because a man is not built to share
earth's parturition. In some way or other a
woman must be always creating, always
bringing forth. If she is not a house-mother,
then she must be slipping, sliding, something
of herself into her roses, her baby chicks, her
home. To be joyous, she must be putting
forth shoots, blossoms, must be pushing
down her roots. To be glad, she must feel
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herself part of this great springing, growing
universe. That woman who has chosen her-
self a farm has done so that she may feel her
head warmed by the life-giving sun and her
feet firm in the fertile earth.

If success lies in having what you want,
then my three farmer friends have attained
it. But sometimes I look at them and won-
der, Is it what once they wanted? The Lady
of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I am
not sure she will not some day have another;
surely there are things her hands might touch
fairer even than roses.* Lady Two has no
story, and is too hearty and happy to note
the fact, but when I see her lift in a strong
brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember
there are heads even more golden and downy.
Lady Three, cozily ensconced in her snug old
farmhouse, looks back into her homeless past,
forward into her unhoused future, fearless in
the knowledge that whithersoever she goes
she carries with her a serene personality that
will always be shaping its whereabouts to
fit it, but her eyes are bright with philos-
ophies that might have sent forth sons and
daughters to splendid living. Like my three
friends who have found quiet in the morning
call of the sun, in the coming of the rain on
a thirsting flower-bed, on all the big little

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concerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on
the good green peace of the universe — a uni-
verse which must have some stout principle
of growth spiritual beneath its seeming waste
of mortal energies, in order that I may not
question why it is that the farm feminine is
not, as it might have been, the farm mascu-
line, the farm infantine.

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XVI

<tA Little (jirl and Her grandmother
AM always sorry for children who have

never known what it is to have a grand-
mother and a grandfather and an old moun-
tain farm to visit, far away from everywhere.
A little girl I once knew had all three. Her
grandmother was the dearest grandmother
I have ever seen. She was tall and stout,
with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands,
as they stroked the little girl's head on her
shoulder, were smooth and soft. The grand-
mother's eyes were blue and full of mischief
and fun and love. When she laughed she
shook all over so that nobody looking at
her could help laughing too; even the little
girl, who was naturally serious. The grand-
mother's cheeks were a soft pink, and her
hair was black, faintly silvered. She wore
it parted plain on week-days, but on Sun-
days it was crimped. On Sundays, too, she
wore her black grenadine, but on other days
her dress was blue gingham with a long white
apron.
The grandmother lived on a farm so steep

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<^A Little Qid and Her grandmother

that it seemed always to be sliding down the
mountain into the valley below. At the back
of the house were a few acres of cleared space,
and then beyond this the stretches of moun-
tain woods. From these woods you could hear
the call of. the whip-poor-wills in the eve-
nings, and there were wildcats and bears there,
too, perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely. The
farm had been a wild sort of place until the
grandmother took hold of it and tamed it.
She had them build a line of white fence pal-
ings between the house and the grass-grown
mountain road. She would have the porch
trimmed with clematis, and they had to
build her a grape arbor, too, and swing a
hammock under it. Above the whitewashed
fence a row of sunflowers nodded, and within
was a line of sweet-peas. In front of the house
were two long flower-beds, bordered with
mignonette. In one was heliotrope, in the
other flowering red geraniums. There were
other flower-beds, too, wherever the grand-
mother could find a place for them, and in
one was a tall plant of lemon verbena. The
grandmother was always plucking a leaf of
this and crushing it, and then clapping her
fragrant hand over the little girl's nose. Such
fun they had with the flowers, snipping and
weeding and watering, their two gossipy
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<tA Little Qirl and Her grandmother

sunbonnets close together! Whatever the
grandmother was doing, the little girl was
always at her heels, except when she was
tagging after her grandfather.

All through her childhood the little girl
used to make long visits at the farm. She was
a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grand-
mother said she was "high-strung," but her
mother and the little girl herself called it just
plain "naughty." At any rate, she was al-
ways losing her temper, and then crying for
hours over the sin of it. She worried over
everything that happened by day, and she
was afraid of everything that might happen
by night, and was always flying from her bed
in terror of the dark. At last, when the little
girl's cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes
so big and anxious that her mother was at her
wits' end what to do with her, she would say
to the father: "We must send Margie down to
mother."

Now the little girl's father, who was a min-
ister, had very little money, and the grand-
mother had less, but somehow they would
do without things and do without things
until they got the little girl safely off to the
old farm, where she grew so brown and fat
and jolly that her mother hardly knew her.

The first of these visits was when Margie

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<iA Little Qirl and Her grandmother

was so little that she would have been a baby
if there had n't been another baby at home.
She remembers only one happening of that
visit — riding high on the hay wagon, she and
her grandmother, while her grandfather drove
the mules. Margie thinks now that perhaps
her grandmother did not enjoy that ride, for
hay is hot and prickly, but whatever the little
girl wanted to do, that the grandmother did.
Another incident of that first visit her grand-
mother used to tell the little girl afterwards.
The little girl always wanted to help her
grandfather in all his work, and often she was
much in the way. Sometimes when there was
hoeing that must be done, the grandfather
would try to slip away unnoticed; then that
tease of a grandmother would point out to the
little girl how the grandfather's overalls were
just disappearing around the corner of the
house, and the little girl would snatch up her
sunbonnet and her fire shovel, and run after,
crying: "Wait for me, grandpa!" Then she
would stand in the furrow right in front of
him and pound away with her shovel, so hot
and earnest that the grandfather had nothing
to do but stand and laugh at her, and down
in the doorway the grandmother, watching
them, laughed, too, because she was teasing
the grandfather and pleasing the little girl.
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&/[ Little Cjiri and Her grandmother

Another visit came the summer when
Margie was seven. Her father was going to
Convocation, and so could take her with him
and drop her off at the grandmother's station.
Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new
sailor suit. She was so excited all the way
that she did not talk at all, and would not
touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the
window, she saw the old spring wagon and her
grandfather holding the reins and her grand-
mother waiting on the platform. Her grand-
mother lifted her up in her arms, doll and
satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her
over to the wagon: at home Margie was
much too old to be lifted and carried. Seated
between her grandparents, while her grand-
mother held her hat and the mountain wind
blew through her curls and her trunk bumped
along at the back, all Margie's worries fell
away from her — she forgot she was a sinful
child, she ceased to think that the babies
were doomed to drown in the river, that her
mother would be stricken by dread disease
and die, that her father would be run over in
crossing the railroad track; and as for spring-
ing from her bed in fear, that night and all
the rest she slept so soundly that she never
woke at all.

Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother

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d/€JUttle Qiri and Her grandmother

would open Margie's trunk and take out all
the little garments and think them the pret-
tiest ever seen, because the little girl's mother
had made them every stitch. From the little
dresses the grandmother would select the very
oldest, and then lock all the others away
again. Down at the village store she would
buy some coarse brown and white stockings,
costing ten cents a pair. From a corner behind
the sewing-machine she would bring out the
sunbonnet she had stitched for Margie in the
winter. It was blue check and had pasteboard
slats that came out when it was washed. Thus
equipped, the little girl might run free of the
farm. She helped to feed the calves and the
chickens and the pigs; she wiped the dishes
for Minnie, the little Dutch maid, in order
that Minnie might be sooner ready to play in
the haymow with her in the long sultry after-
noons through which the locusts shrilled; she
went huckleberrying with her grandfather,
pushing far into the mountain woods, always
treading warily because of the rattlers, and
coming home with a face smirched with purple
under the sunbonnet; she took long drives with
her grandfather along strange, still moun-
tain roads. With him, too, she tried milk-
ing: the cow-bells tinkled through the dusk
of the long shed, and the air was fragrant with
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d/€ Little Qirl and Her grandmother

the hay and the steaming milk-pails, and the
little girl tried with all her might, but usually
she only succeeded in sending a fine stream
into her grandfather's eye. On indoor days
Margie would draw her little red rocker up
beside her grandmother's knee and listen to
stories. The stories were all about mysterious
and unknown relatives, Cousin Letty This
and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah
Something Else. Much of it the little girl
did not understand at all, yet somehow she
liked listening to stories, snuggled against her
grandmother's knee, better than anything else
in the long, blithe days, and the little girl felt
sleepy very early here on the farm — she that
was such a sleepless midget at home.

After supper, while the light was still clear,
her grandmother would undress her and put
on her nightgown: then, when her hair was
combed and her teeth brushed and her pray-
ers said, she would wrap the little girl in the
gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the
big rocking-chair on the front porch. There
the grandmother would croon old songs while
the little girl's head drowsed against her
shoulder, and the summer twilight stole upon
them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will
would sound out from the woods, or the
roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the

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<*,£ Little (jid and Her grandmother

road would rustle and flap their wings, and
sometimes the white moon would come gliding
up the sky, seen dreamily through the clematis
bloom.

As the little girl grew older she could not go
to the farm so often, partly because she took
a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her
mother needed her at home; but always, when
she did go, she and her grandmother had the
same old good times together, and Margie
was still happier there on the old mountain
farm than anywhere else in the world. She
seemed to love her grandmother better now
that she was old enough to think about her
more. The grandmother had some funny
ways. For one thing she would never sit in a
straight chair at table, but always in a rocker.
She would eat a little, and then sit back and
rock a little, and sometimes, since meals at
the farm were leisurely and chatty, she would
fall asleep while she rocked, but she would
never admit that she had napped a minute,
not she. Try as you might, you could never
get the grandmother a present that she would
keep. She loved dainty things, but the pret-
tier the gift, the more she would fall to think-
ing how much it would please some one else,
and so presently away it went. If the giver
chanced to find her out, she would hang her
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&/£ Little (jirl and Her grandmother

hread and look much ashamed of herself, but
all the time her eyes would be roguish. All
the family teased her and she teased them.
She would have walked miles for the sake of
a good joke on any one of them, but her fun
was always tender. One dearly loved joke
she played every year. In October, when the
mountains were wonderful in the blue autumn
weather and the tang of burning leaves was in
the air, a little family of Margie's cousins
used to come out from their town house to the
old farm for chestnuts. For days before they
came the grandmother and Minnie would
gather every chestnut and put away the treas-
ure in a big bag. On the morning of the chil-
dren's coming, the grandmother was always to
be found scattering the hoarded chestnuts in
great handfuls everywhere. Later in the day,
when the children were shouting over the
windfall, she would shake a threatening finger
at the grandfather and Minnie if they dared to
chuckle.

After a while the little girl was quite grown
up and had gone to college, where she had ac-
quired a bad habit of studying herself sick.
Once again her mother in desperation sent her
to her grandmother. At the station the grand-
parents had the spring wagon waiting with a
cot bed; they laid the little girl on it and

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itA Little Cjrirl and Her grandmother

walked alongside up the mountain. That
morning the grandmother and Minnie had
been over all that mile of mountain road and
had picked off every stone, so that the little
girl might feel no jarring. Margie thought
that the back of her head would never stop
aching, but her grandmother nursed her and
fed her and rubbed her, and wrapped her up
warm and put her out in the sunshine; she
told her that she must forget what the doctors
had said, and that the mountain air would
cure her, and so after a while it did.

But there came a last visit. They found
that for two years the grandmother had been
ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it
a secret as long as she could. They sent her
little girl to her for the last time. The grand-
mother would always stop moaning when
Margie came near, and sometimes she would
rouse herself enough to sit up and tell her
stories. She liked to lie in the hammock and
have Margie swing her gently, and she would
often send her down to the ferny spring for a
fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from
the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost
always as she handed this back to Margie she
would say, "Have you ever tasted such good
water as this?" and always she was pleased
when Margie answered, "No. 1
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ey4* Little (jirl and Her (grandmother

One day Margie had to go away to her
teaching. Her grandmother got up from her
couch and walked to the front door to bid her
good-bye. They said very little, and they did
not cry at all, only as Margie looked back
from the turn of the road at the little farm-
house and the valley and the circling moun-
tains, at all the place she loved best in all the
world, she knew that she should never wish to
see it again.

So the little girl's visits to her grandmother
came to an end, like a beautiful book read
through. But though it is never the same
as the first time, one may read a book over
again. The little girl has been grown up for
a long time, but sometimes when she is tired
and worried and frightened she turns back
the pages of her memory. She is sitting on
her grandmother's lap on the porch in the
summer twilight. Her grandmother is sing-
ing to her, and the great moon is rising be-
hind the clematis.

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XVII

The Wayfaring Woman

JUST when, for the first time, I was fearing
lest some day the wizard-light might fade
from my hilltops, because I had climbed them
so often; lest some day people's eyelids might
cease to be doors flashing upon mystery, be-
cause I had seen so many secrets; and lest,
sadder still, I might wake up some morning
and find that my comrade-soul had forgotten
to pipe me on to the new adventure of the
new morning, — just when I was fearing these
things, I bought a pair of rubber boots!

They are real boots, real as all masculine
things are real. They have straps, a new
thing to me in footgear. They are deep and
cavernous, so that I sink to the knee, and in
them I am armored like a man, but yet a
woman. Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my new-
bought rubber boots, of adjustment to a man's
free-hearted adventuring. If I am to tramp
alone, let me be valiantly shod like a man,
though a woman at heart, for is not all the
world mine for the walking it? Who knows
what new fun may be abroad for me now, in
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my rubber boots? I was made for life's out-
of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk
this earth in all weathers, and indeed I have
walked it in many, plucking by my homely
hillpaths thoughts that are wayside flowers
along a subtler way.

I have gazed at my circling hills in many
changing lights. I hate seen them on a moon-
flooded summer evening lie shoulder to
shoulder asleep about the broad valley pas-
tures, while the tree-shadows wavered black
against white farmhouses, asleep, too; and
nothing made any noise except the brook be-
neath my wayside bridge, and that, a merry
brown human brook by day, went singing in
the moon an elfin chant it had forgotten that
it knew. I have seen my hills deepest blue
at the skyline, and below all ablaze, beneath
the racing white clouds of October, when more
than at any other time the winding roads be-
witch my feet, and every blackberry thicket
and slope and fence-row is flaunting its ban-
ners in my eyes; yet I cannot stop to gaze, for
the air is of so keen a blueness; I must walk,
run, fly, because of the urgency of October in
my toes.

But in the spring one's step slackens, and
one stops to loiter and look at the green wil-
lows that twist with the wavering course of

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the swift muddy river; at the rosy mist on
the maple-boughs, at sunny blue wings that
flash against bare branches. In the spring the
most insistent walker must pause by an arbu-
tus bank. Last year's leaves upon it are still
rimmed with frost and snow, and one's fingers
grow red, poking beneath for treasure. But
what largess of arbutus our humblest wayside
banks hereabouts can yield, arbutus great-
petaled, deep-pink, setting free what prisoned
fragrance!

I have tramped my climbing roads in win-
ter-time, too, on those days of winter when
the mercury sinks to the zero point, when the
snow crunches loud beneath my heels, and
the sun hangs high and cold, and the spangle
glistens on crusted fields. But heretofore
there have been days of winter when I have
felt myself held within doors, days of slush
and ooze, when the sky broods low, and the
air is blind with great wet flakes; yet these
were the very days when the gypsy wind
came rattling the window-sash and piping of
new wonders of grayness and of whiteness out
there upon the hills.

I who have packed my wanderer's wallet

with the gentle secrets of summer nights, of

springtime hillsides, and wintry sunshine, I

who have always tramped to the call of a

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lonely road, should I turn craven stay-at-
home when life's wild weather draws my feet
hillward through grim slush and sleet? Are
there not new secrets waiting on the stormy
hills? I am not afraid! I have put on rubber
boots.

In all this countryside I am the only woman
who walks. Highroads and by-paths and
woodways are mine alone, for here solitude is
safe and cheery for the woman who goes un-
companioned. I pass by unmolested, but not
unhailed. Happily, I have reached the age
when men greet me with level comrade eyes,
and pass me merrily the time of day; at least
the genial old codgers of our region do. The
men of my home hamlet of Littleville are a
bit proud of my pedestrian prowess, and if
they meet me wandering far will draw rein to
twinkle down and rally me: "Guess you're
lost this time sure, ain't you?"

The strangers I meet rarely pass me in
churlish silence. I have had a man, never be-
fore seen, bend down from his high-seat, his
face all one pucker of concern, while he
shouted to me in a high windy voice, " Hi,
there, you're losing a hat-pin!" His over-
spread relief as I adjusted it was but one in-
stance of the intimacy ruling within the sweep-
ing circle of hills that rim Littleville like a

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cup. We are no strangers here, we comrades
of the road.

Yet in my walking I must often pay the
penalty of being unique, of being an anomaly
in country conventions. They are kind, our
rural men-folk, but I think the kindest, pass-
ing me, make a swift comparison between me
and their kitchen-keeping women. In this
inarticulate comparison there is a boyish
flash of sympathy that I should find the out-
of-doors the same jolly thing men do; but
more, there is distrust of one who obviously
enjoys the zest of her own feet as much as
their wives enjoy jogging through life beside
a comfortable husband behind a comfortable
horse. Possibly the thoughts of rural men-
folk are not so different from the thoughts of
all other men-folk when they pass the woman
who walks.

Whatever the mental comment attached
to the gaze, the eyes that meet mine are quite
as often astounded as amused. If this is evi-
dent even when I trudge in flooding sunshine,
astonishment becomes irrepressible when I am
seen abroad in snow and sleet. "By gosh!
pretty hard walking you got, ain't you?"

Foot-fast in slush, I pipe back, "But I like
it. I have on rubber boots!"

Such the accost from vehicles not facing in
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my direction; but when a horse that goes my*
way is drawn up, and I decline the proffered
seat; knee-deep in slush, refuse to get in! then
the driver's face expresses such commisera-
tion as I never expected to feel applied to my
inoffensive person. Plainly I see that it is not
my drabbled skirts he is sorry for, it is my
addled wits. Walking country roads in ill
weather has taught me exactly how a lunatic
must feel. It is said that the crazy have a cer-
tain look in the eye; of experience I can affirm
that so also have those who gaze upon the
crazy.

For the passing instant, as I meet that pro-
found pity in mild, masculine orbs, I do doubt
my own sanity, and wonder if perhaps this
glorious freedom of the wild, wet weather is
quite the sensible thing it seemed when I set
out; for it is the look in other people's eyes
that gives us our own spiritual orientation.
Lunacy is a purely relative term. There are
places where women may walk and hardly be
glanced at for so doing, just as, perhaps, within
his own cage-walls, the Bedlamite may seem
to himself a normal human being. Also, per-
haps, the lunatics, like me, have their silent
chuckle; knowing, like me, that they have
their inward fijn, although the nuipskull sane
can't see it. I hope so, for I \rtpuld fain think

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some sunny thought of the poor brainsick
folk.

It is not given to my friends of the high-
way, sensible men creatures on wheels, any
more than to their wives, snug at home in dry
domestic shoes, to know the joy of my walk
through the swift, wet snowflakes. On and
up I go, never meaning to go home by the
same way I have come. What lover of the
road ever does that?

The clinging snow has enfolded all things.
Every tree stands with white, shrouded
branches. The berry thickets are softly furred
with white. The dusky gray aisles of the
roadside woods die to blackness in the near
distance. The little brooks go tinkling be-
neath a thatch of snow bristling with high
grass blades. There is almost no color. Even
the bronze of oak leaves is veiled by white
mist. The world is all white and gray, and in
the distance faintly blue. The fast-falling
snow blurs all familiar outlines strangely, so
that I hardly believe those dreamy roofs
down there belong to humdrum Littleville.

There is strange, muffled silence. I am half
afraid of the woods; they have grown un-
earthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of
the snow that drops from the branches. Gray-
white, silent mystery, — and I should never

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have known or seen it, had I not laughed at
life's wild weather, and trudged forth to it in
rubber boots, all alone.

Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of way-
side groves, of busy secret streams and homely
fields, always the human aspect of the road
engages the woman who tramps with joy at
the heart. In summer and winter, as I go, I
pass the brown milk-wagons, plodding, mo-
notonous, starting forth from all the circling
farms and converging to the milk station.
The drivers have always dull or far-away
faces, for it is always the same road, the same
rattling cans at their backs, the same shaggy,
jogging flanks before them.

Almost always, somewhere on my journey,
I meet the rural mail-man. The bobbing
yellow dome of his narrow wagon is always
easily descried in the distance. The mail-
man knows my tramp-habits well, and the
smile from his little blinking pane never fails
me. Another familiar vehicle is the school
carryall, which nowadays picks up all the
human contents of one of our district schools
and carries them down to Littleville for in-
struction. The school wagon is driven by a
jovial grandsire, and it is always crowded to
overflowing with small, merry people who
hail me. I rarely meet any folk on foot,

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although occasionally a leggined huntsman
slips noiselessly across the road from one
grove to another, while a hound sniffs to right
and left of his path.

The farm-homes for the walker by the way
have each the spell of some new story. There
beside that wind-rocked cupola is some curi-
ous mechanism. For what purpose? To lift
water to a roof-tank? To catch the lightning?
To send afloat an airship? Crude, clumsy,
aspirant, a farm-boy's dream!

I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the
road. A door flings open and a man and a
woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed
me. The woman's face is set in impotent hate,
the man's mouth is wried with cursing; and
the faces are not young, nor the graven bit-
terness a mere passing blight. Man and wife!
Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went
driving gayly back from the parson's, his arm
about her ribboned waist, and posies flaunt-
ing in her hat and in her cheeks — once!

It is given to us who trudge by in the road
beyond the doors to pity often, but to envy
rarely. It is in the nature of things that we
cannot envy, for those things we might covet
are precisely those that come spilling out of
door and window to bless us, so that presently
we are bowing our heads and saying our bit of
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a grace for them, as being also ours. Gentle
old world, so constituted that a home can
lock its door, if it will, upon its sorrow, but
can never hide its joy! I pass another ragged
farmhouse, and here the children in their
homemade little duds are trooping in from
school. Again an open doorway, and in it a
mother wiping red hands upon her apron.
The closing door shuts off sharply the shrill
voices that tell of the day's events; but I have
seen and heard, and therefore I, too, possess.

At still another window-pane there is a
bobbing baby-face. Such a crowing, chuck-
ling joy as is a year-old baby! What home
could ever hide him under a bushel? Strange
mystery, that gives, withholds, inscrutably,
the heart's desire of all of us, and yet ordains
for us who trudge a snow-cold path, that there
shall be, even until we grow gray of soul and
feeble-footed, forever along our way, until
the end, always behind the panes we pass, the
bobbing baby-faces! Other women's babies?
Does it make so much difference whose they
are, so long as they are sweet?

Another happiness it is ordained no woman
shall keep unto herself. The peace of a wom-
an's mouth when a good man loves her, that
is another of the things nothing can conceal,
for sorrow may be leaden and secret at the

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heart, but joy will always out and abroad.
That is one of the things we know, we way-
faring women.

Walks end with the dipping of the day.
The winter dusk steals very early over all the
snowy whiteness. I have to peer to see Little-
ville's clustered roofs down there in the river-
valley. Before I turn to wade back down the
drifted hill-road to the ruddy little home that
lends me harborage for the night, I stand still
to look about me, through the whirling flakes.
See all around me hills I have not yet climbed!
Think of the untried roads that lead to them!
What secret wizardry of new woods, what
elfin tinkle of new brooks, what new farm-
doors, glimpsing upon human mystery! Hills
and the road for me, on and on! Just around
the turn what wonders wait, shall ever wait,
for my rubber boots and me!

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XVIII

The c Koad That Talked

I HAD walked that way a score of times
and never seen that road, yet it must have
seen me and singled me out, or else it would
never have peeped about from its ambush of
berry thicket and swamp and said, "Come."
I was sturdily plodding the broad state road,
for there is a state road everywhere, white and
useful, belonging to everybody, — to the lum-
bering brown milk-wagons, to the bouncing
muddy buckboards, to the motor-cycles with
their vibrant chugging, to the skimming auto-
mobiles. The state road talks business all the
time, incessant talk to blur the hearing; for all
good talk is half silence, and the only people
who have anything to say are the people who
have listened. I was lonely for some one to
talk to when the little road beckoned.

The state road always chooses the river-
way, always bustles along on the level; how
could one ever be friends with a road that
never climbed a hill? My feet were trudging
the macadam, though growing more gypsyish
each moment, when the flash of a red leaf on

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a dusty bush, the rustle of an unseen bird,
and I saw the little road hailing me, and
turned. It was waiting for me, half revealed,
half hidden, like a shy, would-be friend, and
at first, except for certain gypsy gleams along
its fence-rows, it was commonplace enough,
it might have been anybody's road.

At first, too, it went along discreetly, it
turned and walked parallel with the state
thoroughfare, a little apart, it is true, but
steadily patterning on the manners of the
highway, so that if a traveler had chanced on
it, he would have seen nothing unconventional.
The little road went along like that, and waited
for its friends, but I had faith to believe it
would soon begin to climb, that climbing was
what it wanted of me. Imperceptibly at first
it swerved from the parallel, imperceptibly it
mounted a little, so that presently, near as we
still were, we could look down at the village.

Then the little road began to talk, politely,
pleasantly, but in no wise pregnantly. Its
language was meaningless at first, but with
a lure, as comrade eyes light to yours above
lip-chat that does not need to mean anything.
We could go slowly, having all the morning
to get acquainted. Together the road and I
looked down at the town through a screen of
late September leaves.
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The place lay in mist, partly of the late-
lingering fog, partly of the fires that belong
to these days when all the village rakes and
burns, and the youngsters tumble and romp
and shriek in piles of leaves. All outlines are
blurred by a pearly haze, against which eddies
the deeper blue of chimney-smoke. Beyond
the town the hills are dull gray against the
luminous gray of the sky, and between town
and hill the river runs, a shining silver sheet,
with broken, deep-toned reflections near the
bank. Looking eastward through the flicker-
ing leaves, I watch the sun steadily shining
through, shredding the mist with fires of opal,
in gleams of blue and orange and amethyst.
Down at the village they see none of this, they
know only that the fog lifts, while stubble-
gardens, and lawns, and house-fronts all turn
brown and bare and commonplace beneath
the relentless sun. It is for me to see the opal
fires lick up the mist; such cheery little won-
ders of the road are all for me.

The road keeps silence, letting me listen to
the village sounds, musically fused at this
brief distance; the shunting of a freight train
and its raucous whistle, the ringing of ham-
mers on new scaffolding, the shrilling of the
saw-mill, the barking of dogs. All to herself,
like the shy one that she is, the little road

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murmurs her replies, in the twittering of spar-
rows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in
bared branches, in the scratch and scud of dry
leaves that race, the soft thudding of a chest-
nut burr.

The sun is high, and the wind is blowing,
and the comrade road is waiting, genially post-
poning its sure self-revelation, but a-tiptoe to
be off now to the woods, where we may share
our fun unmolested, unsuspected. The little
road is climbing now beyond mistaking. She
is stepping through the woods so familiarly
that you might miss her trail if you did n't
follow close, for she knows there is no fun in
the woods if you can't get lost, can't drop the
pack of personality from your shoulder, and
grow one with brushwood shadow, or arched
branch. When the road said this to me, I be-
gan to listen to her for every word that she
might say. But stealing ever deeper into the
woodland, my path is not talking now, she is
singing rather, she is dancing. Suddenly in
the deeps of the wood sl\e opens up a long
green alley of fairy turf, and waits to see if I
will share it with her and go scudding it like a
squirrel. The white state-way never dreamed
that I could fly, but the little friend-road
knew. The road plays with me. Near the rut
made by a lumber team, she tosses a handful
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of wintergreen berries like flecks of coral for
me to garner, and lifts a sudden torch of
scarlet oak against some wood-recess black
and deep as a cave. Every time she hears the
sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into
still deeper shadow to be alone with me.
Looking to right and left you cannot see the
open; the only open is above, in the blue.

In the heart of the woods there is elfland.
Trusting me, the little road dared to turn mad,
she who had been so circumspect down below
in the valley. Of the trees, some were still
summer green and some were russet gold and
some were claret crimson, so that the sifted
light was strange, the light of faery. "There
is no state road anywhere," said my mad little
path to me, "there is nothing in all the world
but wood and sky. You are a tree, a cloud, a
leaf, — there is no you ! Dance!" In and out
through the trees she eddied and whirled, my
road, glad as a scudding cloud and mad as the
wind, in and out, in and out. Free winds that
piped in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced
the blue above us, laced branches that swayed
to a dance eternal, exhaustless, — round and
round we eddied, panting, the road and I, all
by ourselves, alone, unguessed, in the heart
of the woods. They, too, were drunk with the
madness of out-of-doors, Bacchus's maenads.

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Then, "Whisk!" cried the little road, "we
can't long k6ep up this sort of thing, friend-
woman!" She turned sober in an instant, wild
laughter dying to bubbling chuckles at itself.
The tall trees broke away abruptly on stump-
pocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone
walls. We had come upon a bustling little
farm. My road, the wild and lonely-hearted,
was transformed into a chatty neighbor, and
turned in cheerily to pass the time of day at
the back door. A brisk and friendly farm it
was. The orchard jounced us a red apple as
we passed, a white-nosed horse thrust head
from the barn window and whinnied a wel-
come. Two shepherd dogs, one a stiffened
grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy,
barked a dutiful protest, then sniffed and
licked genially. There was a baby carriage on
the porch, a swing beneath the shaggy door-
yard pine, there were geraniums at the win-
dow, and gleaming milk-pans on "the back
porch. Beyond the big house was a whole vil-
lage of miniature houses, kennels and chicken
sheds and corn-cribs, set down cozily- any-
where to be handy. The big red barns were
chatty with clucking hens. A sunny, sociable,
commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on
the back steps, to pause and rest there, the
road and I. As we chatted, lingering and
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happy, of buttermilk and buckwheat and the
cut of kitchen aprons, would any one have
guessed that this little cozy domestic road,
back there beyond the turn, had reeled in
bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?

When we were alone again, the road
explained, questioning with searching friend-
eyes to see if I understood, "Many selves be-
long to every road that must be always climb-
ing a hill, all alone. Don't you know," laughed
the little road, "that there was never a dryad
but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over
her flickering leaf-films and slip into some
crofter's cot in Tempe and slap the wheat-
cakes on the warm hearth-stones?

"And I have other moods as I climb/'
whispered the little road, as we took hands
and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and
playing with them, with no one to watch, shar-
ing with each other the eternal child that
chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child
within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out
loud in the friendly solitude of little roads like
this.

Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too.
Maples like great torches of flame studded
the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields
marched the corn-shocks, a ragged brown
battalion. The sky was ever burning bluer

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above the hill-crest. Then we left the farm
fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pas-
ture, and suddenly the little road said: "Look,
a wayside shrine! Let us stop."

Pine trees such as survive now in only a
few scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel.
Beneath the trees some one had built a rude
stone pile, a picnic fireplace, now for us be-
come an altar, for to a little wildwood road all
things are natural. We stood silent on that
pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the
arching green, supported on its blue-brown
pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far
tops there went singing an eternal chant. No
one ever listened long to that music, all alone,
who did not know that it is a hymn older than
any creed, and outliving all doubt. In the
amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and
haunted by eternal music, there was beauty
to empty the heart of all desire, so that,
troubled, I asked, "But it was to pray that
we stopped ?"

"Oh," answered the pagan road, "I never
pray, for what is the use of learning how to
lisp? — I only praise!"

We were a long time silent beneath the
pines, but we were deeper friends when we
went on, for there is no bond in friendship
closer than the sharing of a faith. Our feet

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were springing along as up we went. There
were no more farms now, only at last above
us the hilltop and the sky, clouds that raced
across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and
the call of high-winging crows.

The little road, so shy at starting, now
dared to say to me this intimacy, "Do you
not know my gospel, — that gladness is God?
That is why I am always climbing hills. That
is why I called you this morning, so that for a
little while I and you might step into the
sky."

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XIX

My Mother's gardeners

OF gardens "so much has been said and
on the whole so well said," that I might
perhaps restrain my pen from turning up that
overworked soil. But yet the gardens of which
I write have not been like the gardens of the
published page. They have not brought forth
generously either prose of lusty vegetable or
poetry of spicy blossom. Although the gar-
dens have been many, they might almost be
described, so alike have they been, as if they
were one, an itinerant garden that has accom-
panied us from one little hill village to an-
other; for I write of the stony, arid, sterile
garden-plot of a country parish.

Now, however forbidding the garden that
has stretched rearward of each new domicile,
my mother has always fallen upon it with a
valiance of hope that neither years nor dis-
appointment can destroy. She always thinks
that things are going to grow in her gardens,
and things do grow in them, too; but they are
not always the things my mother has led me
to expect. For her, I hope she will find the
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garden of her dreams in Paradise; for me, this
earth will do, even this small, hill-circled scrap
of it; for I am no gardener in my heart, only
an observer of gardens. I own to an unre-
generate enjoyment in watching my mother's
vegetables misbehave, just as, surreptitiously,
I can't help loving the whimsical goats of my
father's rustic flock.

, As I glance back over the unwritten journal
of my childhood, I find the words Choir, Ves-
try, Garden always printed in capital letters.
The Gardener was a figure as momentous in
my infant horizon as was the Senior Warden.
In respect to gardens my mother has never
had any confidence in the assistance of her
own family. There have been occasions when
some son or daughter, temporarily in favor,
has been allowed to hoe softly, under super-
vision; but as to her husband, banishment is
the sole decree. In fact, my father, genuine
old English, imported direct from Trollope,
does not show to best advantage in a garden.
In general I have observed that our country
clericals are likely to be at quarrel with the
soil, that arid independent old soil which will
grow things in its own way, in utter despite of
parsons. My father's original sin was due to
the usual pastoral reluctance to let the tares
and the wheat grow together unto the harvest,

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and it was when he mistook our infant carrots
for Heavcn-knows-what seed of the Enemy
that the decree of banishment against him as a
marauder occurred. Rather than initiate one
of her own home-circle into her garden mys-
teries, my mother has chosen the unlikeliest
outsider, and solicited advice from the most
unprecedented sources, or by any methods of
cajolery; she has been no stickler in regard to
any man's creed or practice when it has been
a question of so vital a matter as cucumbers.

My retrospect shows our gardeners stretch-
ing back to the bounds of my memory, a lean,
gnarled, hoary procession. One of the earliest
of them is Father Time himself, with hoe in-
stead of scythe, and with white locks rippling
down his back. Father Time's frank admis-
sion when engaged might have daunted some,
but did not daunt my mother, for he confided
to her at once that he could hoe but could
not walk. He proved useful when carefully
hauled from spot to spot, but our garden was
cultivated that season in circles, of which the
hoe was the radius and Father Time the
center.

Another of our ancient hoe-bearers was a

veteran. I do not know whether he had lost

his eye on the battlefield or elsewhere, but

certainly he had not exchanged it for wisdom.

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That is why he is the favorite of my mother's
recollections. She likes her gardeners a little
imbecile. They are more manageable that
way. The burden of their intelligence is the
more usual trouble. A simple faith united to
an instant obedience is the desideratum in
gardeners; usually a gardener is as obstinate
as he is conservative, and this is not at all to
my mother's mind. She loves to glean garden-
lore from every source, but better still she
loves to invent garden-lore of her own. She
likes to be allowed to set out on an entirely
new tack with some poor erring cabbage, and
it is*all she can do to hold on to her ministe-
rial temper when she finds that her gardener
has ruined the work of regeneration by some
old-fashioned disciplinary notions of his own.
Our ancient warrior, however, had no notions
of his own, disciplinary or other, and that is
why he possesses a shrine apart in our memo-
ries. He was as meek in my mother's hands
as his own hoe, and he never did anything
she did not wish him to do except when he
died!

On a bad eminence of contrast my memory
declares another figure. I do not remember
whether it was an invincible audacity, or an
utter despair of securing likelier assistance,
that led us that year to employ our own sex-

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ton. It Is an axiom known to every ministerial
household that it is unwise ever to put any
member of your own flock to domestic use. A
brawny Romanist, if such can be obtained,
for laundry purposes, a Holy Roller for the
furnace, and a Seventh-Day Baptist for the
garden — these are samples of our principle
of selection. I do not know just why those of
our own fold are undesirable, — it is wiser
perhaps that the silly sheep should not see the
antic gamboling of the sober shepherd behind
his own locked door, or guess what internal
levities spice the discreet external conduct of
his family. I do not know how it was that we
fell so utterly from the grace of common sense
as to employ our own sexton that summer.
Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the
most mettlesome man that grows, and not at
all to be subdued to the ignoble uses of a hoe.
This sexton was an agony to my father in the
sanctuary, and an anguish to my mother in
the garden. He went about with a chip in his
mouth, and he always held it in one corner
of his lips and chewed it aggressively and
bitterly, and with the other corner he talked,
just as bitterly. Within his own house he
must have exchanged the chip for a pipe, for
although I never saw him smoke, the fragrant
tobacco fumes of him were spread through the
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house after every back-door colloquy. He
talked more willingly than he worked, and
that summer was a lean and sorrowful season,
when the garden languished and my mother
was browbeaten, unable, all because he was
the sexton, to bring the man to order with
the sharp nip of her words across his naughty
pate.

We were more cautious next time and
availed ourselves of one no less meek than a
certain village ancient prominently known to
be an Anarchist and a Methodist. The com-
bination is unusual, I admit, but you may
look for almost anything in a gardener. As
an infant, I used to scan his person for a
glimpse of the red shirt, and his lips for a
spark of the incendiary eloquence, but no
symptom of either ever showed. He was old
and underfed and taciturn, and he gardened
exactly as he wished to, without paying the
tribute even of a comment to my mother's
suggestions. He had such original methods
of his own that, for very amazement, she
gave up her own initiative for the pleasure
of watching his. Once when he was seen sol-
emnly planting stones in one earthy mound
after another, he did break his icy reserve to
answer her irrepressible inquiry; he believed
that potatoes grew better that way, since

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the roots did not have to pierce the earth
for themselves but could wriggle through the
friendly interstices of the stones. That sum-
mer was one of cheerful surprises. This sin-
gular spirit had, I believe, a genuine sympathy
for the poor toiling vegetables; I remember
that he spent one afternoon in tying up his
tomatoes in copies of a certain sectarian
sheet he brought with him for the purpose.
A sportive wind arose in the night, to die
before the Sabbath morning, on which we
beheld not only our rectory lawn, but the
utterly Episcopal precincts of the church,
bestrewn with "Glad Tidings of Zion." He
was a lonely soul and dwelt apart, chiefly in
a wheelbarrow. The vehicle was one of his
idiosyncracies. He never appeared without
it. Up and down our leafy streets would he
trundle it; but yet I never saw anything in
the wheelbarrow except the gardener. He
appeared to push it ever before him for the
sole purpose of having something to sit on
when he wished, from the philosophic heights
of his theological and sociological principles,
to ruminate upon the evil behavior of "cab-
bages and kings."

As I look back over a long succession of
gardeners, I see it, punctuated as it may be
here and there by some salient personality,
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for the most part stretching a weary line of
the aged and infirm of mind and body, and
I wonder by what survival of the unfittest
society devotes to gardening purposes only
those already devoted to decrepitude. As a
matter of fact, the more one becomes ac-
quainted with the vagaries of growing things,
the more one is convinced that it requires
nimble wits and supple muscles to subjugate
the army of iniquitous vegetables the hum-
blest garden can produce. The more you
know of the deception and ingratitude to be
experienced in the vegetable world, the sad-
der you become. In addition to sharpened
brain and taut sinews, the worker in gardens
needs a heart packed with optimism. This
last my mother possesses, and though garden
after garden may have gone back on her,
nothing can prevent her running with over-
tures of salvation to meet the next little
grubby potato-patch life offers her. With
hope indomitable my parents survey each
new glebe, while I, the incredulous, secretly
meditate upon the kinship in conduct of all
parochial gardens, expecting only that the
sheep and the potatoes will find some new
way of going astray; and may Heaven for-
give me that I should be diverted by their
versatility of naughtiness! For example, you

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can never tell what you may expect from a
tomato, for your tomato is a vegetable of
temperament. Poetically sensitive to atmos-
pheric environment, it fades to earth under
the mildest sun, wilts at a frost impercep-
tible to its more prosaic neighbors. Capri-
cious ever, it will sometimes, in mock of its
own cherished nervous system, exhibit a
sturdiness out of pure perversity. One chill
June morning we found our young tomato
plants flat to earth, a black and hopeless ruin.
We bought new ones and set them out in their
stead, whereupon the old plants popped up
and sprouted to wantonness, — nothing but
the elemental energy of jealousy. The tomato
is like to be as barren of production as the
human sentimentalist, either bringing forth a
green bower of leafage, or drooping to earth
with the weight of crimson globes that, lifted,
show a corroding hole of black rot.

In homely contrast consider the bean. The
bean is the kindliest vegetable there is. From
the seed up, it is well-intentioned, for the
bean may be eaten through and through by
worms, and yet, planted, will sprout and
spring, and bring forth fruit out of the very
stones.

The beet is another simple-minded, de-
pendable member of the congregation, and

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even more generous in contribution to the
minister's support than is the bean, for the
beet yields top and bottom, root and branch.
In summer the beet-top furnishes the first
succulent taste of green, and afterwards the
round red root of him is a defense against the
lean and hungry winter months.

But for the most part vegetables are an
ill-behaving lot. The cabbage inflates itself
with an appearance of pompous righteous-
ness, the longer to deceive our hopes and the
more largely to conceal its heart of rot. The
radish sends up generous leaves as if it meant
to fulfill all the mendacious promises of the
seed-catalogue, and when uprooted exhibits
the pink tenuity of an angle-worm. The cu-
cumber is at first, for all our ministrations,
hesitant and coy of leaf within its box, and
then suddenly bursts into a riot of leafiness
whereby it does its best to conceal from our
inquiring eye its swelling green cylinders.
Corn, deceptive like the radish, is prone to
put forth a hopeful fountain of springing
green, only to ear out prematurely, and re-
ward us with kernels blackened and corroded.

In the parochial garden the pea is one to
tease us always with its might-be and might-
have-been. If peas are to grow beyond "the
kid's lip, the stag's antler," they require the

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My Mother's Ofardeners

moral support of brush, and brush is some-
thing a minister's family, aided only by a
decrepit gardener, cannot always supply.
Unsupported by brush, our fair peas lie along
the ground, an ever-present disappointment.

Two vegetables have always haunted my
mother's aspirations, in vain. I hope they
grow in heaven, for it is in the nature of
things that celery and asparagus should be
denied to a nomadic earthly clergy, requir-
ing, as the one does, richness of soil, and as
the other, permanence. Illusory asparagus,
it takes three years to grow him! Of course
if some disinterested predecessor had planted
him, we might in our turn eat him. But our
too itinerant clergy do not give overmuch
thought to their successors. Barren parochial
gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about
letting Apollos water.

But it is not the vegetables alone that
strain my mother's sturdy optimism. All
gardens are subject to invasion by maraud-
ing animals, differing in size and soul and
species, all the way from the microscopic
tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and
playful puppy, up to the cow, ruminating our
young corn-shoots beneath the white sum-
mer moon, on to my father himself, planting
aberrant feet where his holden ministerial
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My Mother's (gardeners

eyes behold no springing seedlings in the
blackness of the soil. But our worst enemies
are hens, and as it happens at present, dis-
senting hens, sallying forth from* the barn-
yard fastnesses of the Baptist parsonage upon
our helpless Anglican garden, plucking our
young peas up out of the soil, and then later
and more brazenly prying them out of the
very pod! Forthwith they fall upon our let-
tuce-beds, scratching away with fanatic fer-
vor, as if for all the world they meant to up-
root Infant Baptism from out the land. All
this is too much for my mother. On the van-
tage-ground of the back doorsill she stands
and hurls coal out of the kitchen scuttle at
the sectarian fowls, — coal and anathema,
low-voiced and virulent. Hers is no mere vul-
gar many-mouthed abuse. There is nothing
of so delicate pungency as the vituperation
of a minister's wife, really challenged to try
the subtleties of English and yet offend no
convention of seemliness. Add to the fact of
the challenge, another fact, that she is of
Irish blood, and that her gallery gods are
just inside the door, and it is a pity her audi-
ence should be merely the hens and I.

Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly ap-
plausive of my mother's defense of her gar-
den, secretly appreciative of the devious

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My Mother's Qardeners

ways of vegetables, witnessing — to forgive
— the wanderings of my father's flock. For
if all the flock were abstemious and orthodox
instead of being, as some are, frankly given
over to alcoholism and agnosticism and
what not; and if the gardens grew, as gardens
should grow, into honest, God-fearing cab-
bages and potatoes; if the righteous corn
parted green lips from kernels firm and white
as a dentist's placard, how then should the
parish gardens that dot our hill-strewn coun-
tryside bring forth that fruit of laughter
which consoles the dwellers in these our tiny
strongholds of lonely effort?

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My Little Tmvn

VIVIDLY at times my memory restores
to me the sensation of the eternal Sab-
bath. Beyond the stained-glass windows, the
sunshine is sifted over daisied graves. Per-
haps, for all one knows, the grown-up angels
are letting the little ones sport over those
graves at this very minute, even though it is
Sunday, for there are no parishes in heaven
to say no to naughtiness. My mother is held
home from the sanctuary that morning. The
three of us sit a-row in the front pew. Above
us our father thunders forth his sermon, to
which we give but scant attention, that roar
in his voice being part of the programme of
this one day in seven. Against my own
shoulder drowses my little sister's head. On
my other side, my little brother conceals his
yawns by receiving them into a little brown
paw, and then, as it were, softly sliding them
into his pocket, as if his hand had other
business there. But I, I sit erect and unwink-
ing, for I am the minister's eldest, and the
Parish is at my back.

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While the younger ones nodded, while the
infant angels played hide-and-seek out in the
graveyard sunshine, of what was I thinking?
This: of the minister's daughter who had lived
in that Parish before me. A great girl of five
she had been when she used, having waited
until her father was engrossed in his sermon,
to slip from that very front pew in which I
sat, to steal up into the chancel, and there, all
silently but with impish grimace and antics,
would she hold the horrified gaze of the Parish
so fascinated that her father would at length
be diverted from his eloquence, and forth-
with, swooping from the pulpit all in a swirl
of wrathful surplice, would bear his small
daughter into the vestry room and lock her
there before resuming his sermon. She was
very naughty, but oh, what larks, what larks!
So I thought then, and still to-day I am
querying whether that little girl — inevita-
bly though she mu&t, under steady parochial
pressure, have been subdued to a woman-
hood of decency and decorum — does not
to-day in middle life rejoice that once upon a
time, at five, she had her little fling in her
father's chancel!

But we were children erf no such indepen-
dent pattern; and so on every Sabbath we
presented to the Parish's criticism unwrig-
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gling infant backs, little ramrods of religion,
while our thoughts went flying off on impish
business of their own; and, as the years flowed
by, on and up to man's estate we tramped,
always thrusting forward in sight of the Par-
ish, fashionable, urban, critical, our shabby
best foot, skittish though that foot might be.
Holding well together, on we went, running
the gantlet of many parishes, until at last
we trudged us into Littleville. We supposed
my little town would be a parish too, but it
is not.

Cozily remote and forgotten among its
blue hills, Littleville has preserved a primi-
tive hospitality, so that, battered nomads of
much clerical adventuring, we sank gratefully
into its little rectory. There was perhaps a
reason for our sincerity of welcome, for if
we had had our parishes, so, too, had Little-
ville had its parsons. It belongs to that
class of far-away, wee congregations whither
they send old ministers outwearied, to be
alone with old age and memories beside the
empty, echoing churches reminiscent of the
days when farmers attended service. And if
among these venerable shepherds there have
fallen to Littleville's lot some whose scholarly
old wits had gone a bit doddering, so that
they believed and preached whimsical doc-

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trine, or could no longer trace without assist-
ance the labyrinth of the liturgy, or others,
younger, who had proved ministerial ship-
wrecks because they were burdened by some
fatal handicap in child or wife, — if such
have come to Littleville, Littleville has been
very kindly. My little town has accepted its
hay-crop as the rain has willed, and its minis-
ters as the bishop has sent them. Its views
on both visitations are produced in a spirit
of comment rather than criticism; its conduct
toward both is that of adaptation rather than
argument.

For instance, there was that bachelor-rec-
tor who preferred the society of beasts to
that of his parishioners in the rectory, and to
that of his fellow saints in the new Jerusalem.
During his incumbency a setting-hen occu-
pied the fireplace in the spare room, and a
dog sat on a chair at his celibate table, and
crouched before the pulpit during service.
Littleville did not protest; rather, of a week-
day, the female members from time to time
descended upon the unhappy man in bis re-
tirement, and with broom and mop-pail
cleaned him up most thoroughly; and of a
Sunday the whole body of the congregation
listened unwinking while their rector's bran-
dished fist demanded from their stolid faces
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eternal salvation for his Rover, — listened
with those inscrutable eyes I have come to
respect: for I know that while Littleville never
argued with their parson the point of kennels
in the skies, they will turn this theological mor-
sel under their tongues down at the hardware
store unto the third and fourth generation.

Then there was the vicar whose poor boy
was scarred in a way that Littleville, sym-
pathetic but always delightedly circumstan-
tial, has painted upon my imagination. When,
during this rectorate, rival sectarians would
point to the goodly ruddiness of some Bap-
tist or Methodist scion, the Littleville Angli-
cans would loyally argue that Seth Lawson
over at Hyde's Crossing had a little girl who
had four thumbs, and Seth was just a plain
man, and no minister.

Tradition tells also of a parson who trod
the mazes of the ritual so uncertainly that
he was just as likely to jump backwards as
forwards in the psalter. With inimitable
delicacy Littleville would stand holding its
prayer-books at attention, ready to jump
with him, whichever way he went. However,
certain women have confided to me how fear-
ful they were, on their wedding-day, lest this
retrograde movement might occur during the
solemnization of matrimony.

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My Little Tozvn

Thus it came about, I fancy, that Little-

ville received us with relief as well as warmth,

for our theology was so simple and sound that

hardly could the agnostic barber find fault

with it; a family studiously normal, we showed

" Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious; " —

and we proved able to conduct service with
sonorous equilibrium.

Here we have been accepted and courte-
ously entreated. Here we have not had to
live up to any parochial pretensions, for my
little town does not play bridge or give din-
ner-parties. Here in my little town we need
not rise betimes to perform miracles of domes-
tic service on the sly in order to be free to
attend on the lordly city parishioner pos-
sessed of maidservants and manservants.
Rather we may wear our gingham pinafores
on the front porch, and pop our peas under
the very nose of the senior warden, and very
probably with his assistance, if he perchance
slouch down beside us, blue-overalled and
genial.

Littleville, always leisurely, took its time
about getting acquainted with us. It hurtled
us through no round of teas, it did not put
us through the paces of a parish reception.
Rather it came and hammered together our
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broken furniture, decayed by much mov-
ing, it stole in at the back door to help us
when we were sick, it let us know it missed
us when we went worldward, visiting. Of
such as it had, it made us gifts, — a yellow
pumpkin vaulting our back fence, potatoes
rattling into our cellar-bins unannounced
while we were still abed, golden maple syrup
flowing for us at the time when tin pails gleam
all up and down the street, and the sap-vats
bubble and steam pungently; or perhaps the
gift is the reward of the gunning season, as
when a vestryman-huntsman, as we stand
about the social door after church, darts aside
into the coalbin and thence presents a news-
paper package streaked with pink; peeped
at to please his beaming eye, it exhibits a
brace of skinned squirrels, which we bear
oozily homeward from divine service.

There is in the mere aspect of Littleville
a latent friendliness perceptible to all eyes
that give more than a touring-car glance.
Over our hilly streets slumbers eternal leisure.
Whatever it is, Littleville always has time
to talk about it. When anything happens
we all go running out of our front doors to
discuss it, but otherwise our streets are very
still: rows of farmhouses planted side by
side for sociability, while behind each stretch

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its acres of stony pasture and half-shorn
woodland. At night, silence and darkness
settle upon us early. By nine even the hotel
has gone to bed, so that it would with diffi-
culty be summoned forth in protesting paja-
mas if a late traveler should clamor at the
door. Of a starless night you may look forth
at eight and see no glimmer of light or life all
up and down the street. When we come to
church of a winter evening, we carry lanterns
as we plod a drifted path in high-girt skirts
and generous goloshes. One's sleep is some-
times startled by a flare of light that streams
from wall to wall and passes, as some mys-
terious late lantern-bearer goes by, leaving
the night again all blackness, pierced some-
times by the crazy laughter of an owl, or
beaten upon by the insistent clamor of frogs.
Those who live by Littleville's quiet streets
have had time to have their little ways. For
example, they still have "comp'ny" in Little-
ville. In other places they no longer have
comp'ny, no longer sacrifice for unprotesting
hours and days and weeks all domestic peace
and privacy to the exigencies of an intrusive
guest. Comp'ny, imminent, instant, or past,
is discussed in bated whispers at back doors.
Assistance and sympathy are proffered as in
a run of fever. As for the comp'ny itself, it
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knows its privileges and never resigns its
prerogatives. However efficient at home,
when a-visiting, it can sit on the barnyard
bars in its best store suit and without an emo-
tion of conscience watch its host milk twenty
cows, or within doors it can fold its house-
wifely hands upon its waistline, regard with-
out compunction a lap for once apronless,
and rock and chatter hour after hour while
its hostess pants and perspires to feed it.
But Littleville has one revenge: one day, it,
too, can put on its best and drive off, and
itself be somebody's comp'ny.

Comp'ny by definition comes from abroad,
invading our peaceful citadel from some hill-
side farm or neighboring village; within our
own bulwarks we are all too neighborly for
any such alien stiffness. Our streets are
cheery with greeting. Among the younger
fry, "Hello " is the universal term of accost.
" Hello !" some youngster yodels to me from
across the street, "hello," supplemented by
the frank employment of my baptismal name,
sign and seal of my adoption. We are care-
less of the little formalities of Miss and Mr.
here, just as our gentlemen are careless of
their hat-raising. Why should Littleville man
endanger head and health from false def-
erence to his hearty, workaday comrade,

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woman? From the older men, surely, twin-
kle and grin are greeting enough without
any up-quirking of rheumatic elbows; and
as for the younger men, I have a fondness for
their method of raising the right index finger
to the hat-brim, with a smile that points in
the same direction.

Although we are without formality, cer-
tain conventions always belong to a call. The
popular hours are two and six, with the tacit
exemption of Saturday evening, for then we
might inconsiderately intercept the gentle-
man of the house en route from his steaming
wash-tub in the kitchen to his ice-bound
bedroom. We have our set forms of greeting
and departure. A hostess must always meet
a caller with a hearty, "Well, you're quite a
stranger." A caller must always remain a
cordial two hours, and rising to leave must
invariably say, "Well, I'm making a visit,
not a call"; to which the hostess responds,
"Why, what's your hurry?" Conversation
must hold itself subject to interruption, must
be prepared to arrest itself in the midst of
the most lurid recital in order that all may
fly to the window if man or beast or both pass

by.

A6 to that conversation itself, we really do
not care for feverish animation. We allow
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ourselves long pauses while we creak our
rockers, pleasantly torpid. Should our empti-
ness become too acute, there is always one
subject that can fill it. We always have the
sick. We report to each other anxiously that
So-and-So is having "a poor spell," a condi-
tion that, if obstinate, will result in the poor
man or woman's "doctoring," a perilous sub-
stitute for home treatment. We have our
hereditary nostrums of combinations quainter
than Shakespeare's cauldron, and home-made
brews of herbs that sound almost Chaucerian.
There is suggestion still more remote in "hem-
lock tea." I am not certain of its ingredients,
but its effect is to produce a state of affairs
known as a "hemlock sweat." A "hemlock
sweat" is the last resort before sending for
the doctor, and it generally brings him.

If our interest in our diseases should ever
flag, we have, of course, always, our neighbors.
In Littleville, gossip has become an art, in so
far as it possesses the perfection of pungency
without taint of malice, like the chat of an in-
quisitive Good Samaritan. When Littleville
talks about its neighbors, I listen in reverence
before a penetration I have never seen any-
where else. Littleville has not gone abroad
to study human nature; it has stayed at home,
and watched every flicker of its neighbor's

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eyelash, has marked each step taken from
toddling infancy to toddling old age, has list-
ened to every word uttered from babyhood to
senility. Oh, Littleville knows its own; and
knowing its own, knows other folk too. New-
comer though I am, I should venture no pre-
tense in the face of that slumbering twinkle
in Littleville's eyes, — Littleville, sharp of
tongue and genial in deeds.

This grace of Littleville charity, charity,
keen-eyed yet tender, can be, I suppose, the
possession of stationary people only; of peo-
ple who have been babies together, have
wedded and worked, been born and been
buried together, whose parents and grand-
parents also are unforgotten, whose dead lie
on white-dotted hillsides in every one's
knowledge. The thought of this bond of per-
manence, of memories, has its wistfulness for
us others. You can never be very hard on
the woman, however fallen, who was once the
little Sallie to share her cooky with you at
recess; and, however his poor grizzled head
be addled now with drink and failure, a man
is still the little Joey whose bare feet trod with
yours the stubble of forbidden midnight or-
chards.

All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and
we are gypsies, we clericals; yet never gypsies
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more involuntary, more home-loving at heart.
We are pilgrims, never dropping, as we so-
journ in parish after parish, the pilgrim cloak
of an affable reserve. Back to the edges of
my memory, we ourselves have been always
the Ministry. Sundays in that straight front
pew, week-days in that well-watched rectory,
always the Ministry, never ourselves. But
here at last in my little town, is that straight
cloak of ministerial decorum slipping from us?
May we set down our scrip and staff? At last
do we dare to be ourselves, neighbors with
neighbors? Do we dare to be part of a place?
Perhaps.

Already in brief years I have acquired a
little of that admitted intimacy with a com-
munity that comes only through knowing
some bit of its history for one's self and not
on hearsay; for I have observed the course of
several of our thrifty Littleville courtships
whereby our youngsters in their later teens
set themselves sturdily beneath the yoke of
matrimony, promptly bringing forth a pro-
cession of babes, as promptly led to baptism.
Also I have stood with the rest in our little
graveyard when some old neighbor has been
laid to rest. I share with the rest the memory
of kind old hands grown motionless, and chir-
rupy old voices now stilled; so that some of

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these graves, turning slowly from raw soil to
kindlier green, are mine, the stranger's.

Because those newer graves are mine, I
may linger in more assured friendliness among
the older ones, for to me these brief white-
portaled streets of this other Littleville are
kindly too; so that I like to go a-calling here
also, letting my fancy knock at these low
green mounds beneath the mat of periwinkle,
above which sometimes flash the blue wings
of birds or of sailing butterfly, while just be-
yond the fence the bobolinks go singing above
the clover-fields. Country graveyards are
pleasant places; at least ours has no gloom
of tangled undergrowth and dank cypress
shadow, for we are a house-wifely company,
and we like all things well swept and ship-
shape, even cemeteries.

Even the tragedies the marbles tell are soft-
ened now. There are many little gravestones
in our cemetery, recording little lives long
ago cut short. Many of them belong to that
winter I have heard about, a winter long be-
fore antitoxin or even disinfectants, when one
Sunday in Littleville twenty children lay
dead. It was sad then, but to-day to the tune
of soaring bobolinks I must be thinking how
gayly the little ones put on their winglets all
together, and, a white flock, went trooping
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off, shepherded by angels. In a village grave-
yard where the dead lie so cozily close to
home, in a graveyard so blue above and green
below, one has to remember how many things
are sadder than death.

I come back from reverie as the 'bus bell
goes tinkling by, beyond the white-arched
gate, and I rise to gaze to see who has come
to us from the world, for the 'bus comes from
the train, and the train comes from far away,
where the world runs its whirligig, far from
Littleville.

The 'bus connects us with life. When one
arrives at home, usually at nightfall, there
always is the old 'bus man at the train step,
peering up and stretching out both welcom-
ing arms to receive our packages and bags.
When he has stowed all away, in he climbs
rheumatically, and off we trundle, rattling
and wheezing along, for driver and horses and
'bus are all in the last stages of decrepitude.
The lantern hung between the shafts plays
out its straight jet of light, but within it is
so dark that I cannot guess our whereabouts
until we draw up at the hotel. The hotel-
keeper comes out in his shirt-sleeves to receive
the fat agents we have brought him, and, peer-
ing hospitably into the dark recesses, gives me
welcome too. Off and on we rumble, and as

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we draw rein at the post-office, the post-
master, shouldering the mail-bag, spies me
and extends his hearty handshake; from the
newspaper office near by, where the editor
is working, comes a hazarded greeting, to
which I respond cheerily from my dark hole,
and become forthwith one of to-morrow's
items.

On and up the hill. I can just discern the
white belfry against the blue-black sky. Be-
yond the church is the rectory, and there a
lantern on the step and a ruddy door flung
wide. I have drawn up, returning, to rectory
doors before, but somehow in Littleville it is
different; to-morrow, on Sunday, Littleville
will be glad I have come back, and will say
so, at church, for in Littleville Sunday is dif-
ferent, too.

Here there is never the Sabbath stiffness
of my childhood. Here the front pew does not
straighten my spine intolerably. Rather I turn
half about, run a careless arm along the pew-
rail, and chat huskily with my rear neighbor
until church begins, and even in service I may
nod encouragement to the choir if they hap-
pen to be brought to confusion in the Te
Deum, or in the very sermon I may peep under
some little flowered straw hat and get a de-
lighted grin in response. When service is over
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I shall be a long time getting to the door,
having so many hands I want to shake, for
we do not call my little town, Parish; we call
it home.

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XXI

(jenus Clericum

WAS a ministerial child rather by birth
than by conviction. To one born on the
march there may come to be in the end a mys-
tic home-sense in the loneliness of tents, but
in the beginning the army child may perhaps
have his own opinion of the rigors of camp life
and prefer his morning snooze to the sum-
mons of the bivouac. Analogously, the chil-
dren of the clerical class may come into exist-
ence with a leaning toward the world, the
flesh, and the devil, and may long conceal,
beneath an outward conformity and a due
filial reticence, an infant resentment against
the preoccupation of their parents with the
salvation of souls.

I think I speak for many ministerial chil-
dren when I say that the attitude of my in-
fancy toward its environment was mainly one
of protest, broken by passionate upheavals of
partisanship. Sometimes I sympathized with
little neighbors who limped shamelessly
through the catechism or went out of church
before the sermon, but as often I longed to
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shake them and thrust them, well-prodded,
upon their duties.

The mere external discipline of the church
militant came easily to me because I was so
early inured to it. It is back of my memory,
but I have ascertained that it was at the age
of two and under that I learned rigidity of
muscle in the sanctuary, where I sat hold-
ing immobile on the pew cushion legs too
short to crook, while my fingers, in white cot-
ton gloves, were extended in stiff separation
each from each. The hat upon my head was
in itself an early example of ministerial ad-
justment to parochial issues. Two ladies who
were rivals in missionary zeal had each been
moved to present me with a hat. That
neither hat suited either my face or my
mother's taste was, of course, mere incident.
The claims both of courtesy and of equity
necessitated my wearing the hats in impar-
tial regularity, on alternate Sundays. Thus
before the beginnings of memory, and through
the medium of a baby's hat, did I become ac-
quainted with the potency, in our domestic
concerns, of that great public called Parish.

It must have been at about this period
that I experienced one of my intermittent
attacks of partisanship, desiring with my
clear infant voice to rebuke the lukewarm re-

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sponses of the congregation, and remodeling
the unintelligible stretches of the Litany by
the stentorian variation, "Lord have mercy
upon us, miserable scissors!" The words of
liturgy and hymn did not, however, long con-
found me. I had the concentration of many
a sanctuary hour to devote to their meaning,
so that by six years old even the Trinity had
become a term of crystalline comprehension.
By this time, also, other ministerial baby-
kins had come toddling into the march in my
rear, to share with me the soberness and sep-
aration of our calling. It was, on the whole,
well disciplined, our little army corps, al-
though we recognized the latent twinkle in
the eyes of the mother who generated us with
a clever balancing of motive between our
well-being and that of the Parish. Both she
and we were occasionally flabbergasted, some-
times by our public performance of private
virtues, sometimes by our private perform-
ance of public ones. For example, at the home
table we were always exhorted to conscien-
tious chewing; it did not, therefore, occur to us
to accelerate the process at a Sunday-School
picnic. The sylvan board had long been de-
serted by others, but we, the Rector's chil-
dren, a faithful little line, longing to be on
the merry-go-round, in the swings, on the
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boats, still sat and dutifully chewed and
chewed and chewed. I vividly recall the be-
wildering onslaught of our mother leading a
bevy of church ladies in search of the missing.
Ignominiously were we whirled oiF to join the
sports of less seeming-famished companions.

On the other hand, in public, in the Sun-
day School, were we early made to under-
stand that all the law and the prophets hung
upon the catechism; a pink-paper catechism,
frank in its woodcuts and facile in its expla-
nation of the mysteries of the sacraments.
Since this pink catechism was a lamp unto our
feet, we suggested, during a thrilling burglar
epidemic, that copies be left on the thresholds
of rectory bedchambers. The burglar would
pause to read, and there would ensue his im-
mediate conversion and our resultant security.
The parental laughter at our expense shook
the foundations of our faith.

Such a severe consistency of behavior in
regard to the lessons taught in the rectory
and those taught in the sanctuary is a state
of mind early outgrown by any intelligent
ministerial child. Such crudity of conduct was
a stage in the march that we had all passed
by the age of ten. By that time we had an
unerring sense of what was due to the Parish
and what was due to ourselves, with the result

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that our outward conformity was about
balanced by our inward misanthropy at hav-
ing to conform. We attended, muttering im-
precations up to the very door, the infant
missionary society that filched our Saturday
afternoons, we tore up futile scraps of calico
to jab them together again with accursed
"over-and-over" stitches, we gazed at pic-
tures in which splendid blanketed braves, or
splendid unclothed Samoans, were seen to
exchange romance for religion in the shape
of conversion and white cottas. Our souls
loathed patchwork and missions, but, on the
other hand, how we thrilled to the righteous-
ness of reward when the visiting missionary,
male or female, became our own particular
guest! The ecstasy as one flirted one's Sun-
day flounces before the eyes of less favored
neighbors because one was walking to church,
holding the hand of a genuine Arctic arch-
deacon! And then the Bishop's visits, when
we were whisked into cubbyhole and closet
out of our crowded nursery that it might be
converted into a prophet's chamber! Which
one of my schoolmates had ever passed the
right reverend plate at supper? And the
honor of the Bishop's petting afterwards!
The episcopal lap, the high general's knee, is
the prerogative of the captain's children only,
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the same that never miss church and know
all their collects.

Slowly we grew accustomed to the pressure
of the knapsack upon our shoulders, that
weight of clerical example which did not bur-
den our irresponsible playmates. We knew
that the Minister's children were different.
We did not want it to be so, but we began to
see why it was so. True, we protested when
our father would not pause to tell us stories or
our mother stay at home from calls to play
with dolls, yet in the silent thinking-places
of our little hearts we began to divine the
beauty of the midnight sick-watches, of the
valiancy of Sunday-School labors, of the brave
weariness of sewing societies, of the heaven-
born patience with Parish bores. As we
watched the sleeker parents of our school-
mates, there dawned in us realization of what
our parents had given up, and silent shame for
our jealousy of their devotion. Few children
are hurt by being shoved aside a little be-
cause of an ideal. The hours when our par-
ents played with us are still passing precious,
but it is because of the other hours that there
was born in us a shamefaced sense of the
meaning of the banner under which we
trudged.

Isolation is the chief inconvenience of hav-

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ing an ideal in the family. We were apart
from other youngsters, partly because we
knew it incumbent upon us to set them
an example, since, early enough and sadly
enough, we had acquired self-consciousness
from the frank criticism of all our conduct
made by any parishioner so minded, and
partly were we cut off by the vow of poverty
taken by our parents. Other families may
look forward to easier times; no ministerial
household has any such illusions. The tini-
est child of the ministry knows that after
forty the father will not receive a call; the
veriest baby of us knows what happens to old
ministers, because so many pitiful, decrepit
old soldiers have from time to time found
shelter in our tent.

Yet the ministry is the best place in the
world to learn that poverty is a nut that
yields good meat if you crack it boldly. Well
I remember an icy rectory which had but one
register in the Arctic regions of the second
story. At bedtime we would gather about
this register to warm our toes. Each blanketed
to the ears like a little Indian, we would dis-
course as serenely and acutely as any school-
men, of the nature of angels, for was not the
whole realm of heaven and earth ours for the
mere talking? Pinched and patched we might
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be, but bold to meet penury with a conscious-
ness of princely possessions. I did not so much
think well of myself for this superiority to
worldly comforts as I thought scorn of those
who did not have it. Very early I had a con-
tempt for a child who could not evolve a game
from a clothespin or set a pageant moving
forth from a box of buttons. I had a veritable
snobbishness of disdain for a youngster who
had to be amused.

Necessarily one requires respect for inward
resources when the only things one has ever
had enough of are bread and butter and books.
Every ministerial child breathes book-mad-
ness and burns for an education. When at the
age of five you have known your father to
go without boots for a book, and then to
caper like a weanling lamb on the volume's
arrival, you have acquired something more
potent than a mere conscientious respect for
literature; rather you have learned to regard
the book-world as a place of bacchanal lib-
erty and delight forever open to you. I do not
know whether it tended toward my humaniz-
ing or against it that the dominant beings
of my young imagination were Books, while
those of my girl friends were Boys.

There is nothing more effective than cleri-
cal penury to teach one the cheapness of

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dreams. The door of fantasy stands always
open for the rectory household to enter,
singly or together. I think every ministerial
family cherishes that one dear dream of all
unwilling gypsies. They always hope some-
how, somewhere, sometime, to find a house
that shall be a home. Do what you may, a
rectory is always house, not home. It may
always belong to some one else next month.
If only it were worth while to plant perennials
in our flower-beds! If only it were worth
while to plant friendships to bear fruit in
after years! Yet this last we can never help
doing as we pass from parish to parish, being
at heart most human of wanderers. It must
be very beautiful to belong somewhere, to
have, for instance, cousinships in the neighbor-
hood. There are never any family parties in
the ministry. There are never any gentle
grandsires to come forth from their kindly
crypts and give guarantee of our characters
to the community. On each new camping-
ground we stand, a huddled family group,
completely dependent on our own efforts for
introduction.

These new-parish sensations tempt to gen-
eralizations, for they are so alike, in town
after town. The zest of a new call wears away
even in one's infancy. Perhaps the captain
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still expects to find his tents pitched in Ar-
cady, but not so his family; we meet the Par-
ish's reception acutely on our good behavior,
exquisitely affable to all, but our inner motto
is, "Watch out!" It is usually those parish-
ioners who give us most effusive welcome who
will be readiest to desire our godspeed. It is
those who stand back and look us over who
will be our firmest friends. We cannot resent
their attitude because it is exactly our own.
We, too, are looking them over.

When we go into a new parish the first
person we meet is some one who is n't there,
namely, our predecessor, that thorn in the
flesh of the most righteous saint and soldier.
There is always a predecessor, and however .
dead or distant, he is always there, in the
hearts of the Parish, and quite frequently he
is in their homes as well. However callous,
however courteous one may endeavor to be,
one cannot escape a slight sensation of stiffen-
ing when parishioners want The Other One
to marry or bury them. Think of the well-
bred wrangle that sometimes occurs in settling
the clerical rights to a corpse! In all my min-
isterial experience I never knew a predeces-
sor and a successor who loved each other. Yet
I speak without bitterness, for one of the
proudest and pleasantest sensations of our

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ministry has been that of being a predecessor
ourself.

To an unwilling nomad there is nothing so
monotonous as change, yet the very con-
stancy of our march engenders an amazing
ease of adjustment to each new environment.
In our relations to people, we clericals learn an
adaptability almost pathetically perfect. We
succeed in being all things to all men by never
being all ourselves to any man. Our affability
is the armor that protects the inner sensitive
personality. Perhaps we are naturally ex-
pansive, but we early learn the perils of frank-
ness, so that it comes about that along our
pilgrimage we are friendly, but have few
friends, those few, however, the tenderest,
trustiest friends in the world, those few, rare
spirits of a keenness and a kindness to pene-
trate the steel-strong armor of ministerial
reserve. Very young, we clerical sons and
daughters learn to pass from millionaire tb
laundress with no change of manner. The
reason is not far to seek; we own senior
warden and washerwoman as our parishioners,
equally, because warden and washerwoman,
equally, feel that they own us. With equal
freedom the two censure or serve, love or
bate, us. Recognizing the proprietory rights
of each, we realize that each may be equally
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our bane or our blessing. Yet our democracy
goes deeper than all this. Half-hearted sol-
diers we may often be, but we never doubt the
sincerity of our flag. We had the luck to be
born into the household of the consecrated,
whether we wanted to be or not; we are
genuinely democratic for the same reason
that the apostles were.

Perhaps there is another reason, and a
wickeder one, why all men stand in our sight
naked of all accidental social trappings; and
that is that we know them all so well! I can-
not determine how clearly the world may see
into rectory windows, but certainly one sees
pretty clearly from rectory windows. It is a
heart-searching and heart-revealing relation,
that of a parish to its parson. The com-
pletely voluntary nature of all church effort
and church organization affords an exhibition
of idiosyncrasies not to be found in any other
association. When I think of the crimes aq,d
the crankiness sometimes committed in the
name of religion, I thank Heaven that the
effect of these in a ministerial household is
more often amusement than cynicism. I was
grown up before I realized that the ostensible
purpose of a choir is to praise the Lord: in my
youth I always thought of a choir solely as a
means of perfecting a rector in patience.

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But always there exists the other side in
the parochial relation, the side not of bad-
ness, but of beauty. Personally I perceive no
stronger argument against the charge of pres-
ent-day irreligion than the tribute of trust
paid to any sincere minister. From my child-
hood on I have seen it everywhere, the re-
spect for consecration. Everywhere I have
heard it, the belief in the man who believes,
ring confident as the cry of the roadside beg-
gar upon the Nazarene.

Few people think it worth while to put on
pretense with a clergyman; they rarely try to
make him think them better than they are;
yet he generally does think so. It is frequently
the alertness to protect the captain against
his own unworldliness that teaches his family
their sanity and sureness of insight. This very
insight may, however, make them poorer-
spirited than their superior officer, craven and
fain to capitulate. In a parish skirmish they
are likely to be divided between hot loyalty to
his cause and a vain hope that he won't think
it necessary to fight. I can picture the prob-
able domestic anxiety in the house of Cal-
chas when in pursuit of his calling he found it
necessary to stand up to the king of men,
Agamemnon!

Long campaigning is likely to make minis-
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terial oflFspring lovers of peace, yet I believe
I am not really unwilling to fight the Devil.
The trouble is that we of the ministry so often
fight him when he is n't there. I wish our
young theologues could be taught the sound
and shape of Satan. Frankly I arraign the
theological seminary as a very poor military
school. It sends forth a soldier who does not
know so much as how to set up a tent, whose
idea of the Enemy is a mediaeval bugaboo in
a book. I would establish two new chairs in
our seminaries, a chair of agriculture, rudi-
mentary, perhaps, but sufficient to teach the
difference between tares and wheat, which
Nature, uninstructed in any isms, still ordains
shall grow together unto the harvest; and a
second chair, in common sense, to dispense
instruction in human nature. The average
theologue is deep-read in Hebrew Scripture,
but ignorant of the A B C of the tongue
in which is written the Bible of man's soul.
Doctors may dispute the divine inspiration of
the former, but who of us is infidel enough to
dispute the divine inspiration of the latter?
Perhaps the more reprehensible fault of the
seminary is not so much deficiency in the
matter of its teaching as deficiency in its
maturity. No thinking person wishes to re-
ceive his spiritual guidance from an unthink-

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ing boy. I am constantly puzzled by the ill-
logic of our ministerial preparation when I
reflect that the foundation of its teaching is
the fact that God Himself thought it neces-
sary to be thirty years a man with men before
He was ready to teach or to preach.

Considering his inadequate equipment,, so
inferior in the relation of means to end to
that of the social worker, the average minister
of to-day does better than his preparation de-
serves. If he has devotion, devotion will, in
the long run, counteract his blunders. People
will put up with almost anything from a man
so long as he's a man. There never was a
time when respect for a clerical coat, as a coat,
was less; there never was a time when rever-
ence for the man within the coat, as a man,
was greater. Because of this fact, we of the
ministry who best know the seamy side of an
ideal know also 'best its beauty.

I was born beneath a banner I did not
choose, but like many another ministerial
child, I have grown from a mere external
allegiance to a real one. I think the angel$ of
birth were a little distraught when they
dropped me in the tents of the righteous, but
on the whole I am reconciled. I have traveled
to and fro and far, but only the rectory tent is
home, there alone exists the nomad's intense
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family friendship which is a home's sole endur-
ing furniture. I have wandered so far among
other men and other manners and morals that
sometimes our little band has seemed but a
faint dot on the spaces of a universe un-
dreamed of within the limitations of rectory
walls. Wandering thus, I have questioned
many things unquestioned in my childhood.
Only ministerial children themselves can esti-
mate how open they are to doubt's attacks.
The very intensity of partisanship and narrow-
ness of creed and practice in which they have
been brought up are sources of danger, while,
having always been nourished on the glory of
the mind, they will always in their traveling
gravitate to the places of intellect, only to find
their little faith regarded there as one more
soap-bubble to be tossed about. Accustomed
at home to the old-fashioned unquestioning
distinctions, the minister's son or daughter
will discover that there no longer exists the
old sharp fight between orthodoxy and heter-
odoxy, because each side recognizes far too
well a kinship in weakness and wistfulness.
There was a time when to take a man's faith
from him was a fair game, for it was his own
affair to guard a castle aggressively inviting
attack. Now even infidels are tob pitiful to
steal another man's God.

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It is not so simple an adjustment as perhaps
it externally appears, the return to the tiny
clerical camp whence once we issued forth to
our education. Perhaps I have thrilled to the
trumpets of larger armies, perhaps our little
troop of skirmishers seems to me a sorry one
now, and perhaps, darker treachery still, the
hosts of Midian do not loom so big and black
to me as of old, perhaps I have even made
some charming friends among the Hittites
and the Jebusites, but it is astonishing how,
when I am back in the old conditions, the
enemy's ranks resume their old color and pro-
portion.

When I am abroad I am no stickler for
church attendance, yielding myself some-
times to the call of a "heaven-kissing hill"
or to the spell of woods sacredly serene; but
at home I am accustomed by contagion to
look darkly askance at Sunday picknickers
or lazy stay-at-homes. They should come
and hear my father preach ! Yet I myself
feel God nearer on a hilltop than at the altar,
and I own, as closest comrades and most in-
spiring, men and women whose souls never
bow in worship anywhere. They belong to
another army, that army of social betterment
which is so curiously blind to its own pillar
of fire. My creed is to their minds a child's
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lisping, they ask neither a God nor an im-
mortality, they ask only that they may lift
the burdened man upright. If we cannot
worship, let us work, people say to-day, and
do not dream that never before in history
was there enough religion in the world to
make theirs a plausible deduction.

These my friends belong to the army of
non-church-goers arraigned in the little vil-
lage church where I kneel to say my prayers.
It is very strange, they say to me, — these
soldiers of an army grown far larger now than
our thinning ranks, — very strange to me
that you should need a religion; and I answer
it is very strange to me that you cannot hear
above the blackness of your hosting, your
own prophet voices choiring a midnight mass
to Heaven.

There are divers ways of worship and I
acknowledge that my own way, minister's
daughter though I am, exemplary in exter-
nals, is not always that which would appear
best in accord with my bowed head and prac-
ticed knees. There is much in your full-sized
Anglican that is bigger than his Prayer Book,
although I loyally hold that an inspired docu-
ment of Christian common sense. Many a
windy, rollingv thought comes to me when I
am kneeling in secret rebellion at the abase*

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ment of the Litany, irreverent, meseemeth,
to the souls cast in God's image, but who am
I that I should think scorn of any words by
which people climb to Heaven? Suppose I
should compose prayers for my father's con-
gregation, think how bewildered the good
people in our pews would become if they
should find, writ out for their repeating, the
calls of birds and the voices of winds, which
I know would sing themselves into any
prayer of my making.

No, in its prayers and in its practice, I find
myself ever turning quietly back to the faith
of my fathers, that banner of my clan. Per-
haps I may think its gold tarnished with
medievalism, its silk worn very thin, but
are not all banners merely the work of men's
hands? And what matter of the ensign so
long as it holds skyward? I, within the min-
istry, may sometimes question our methods
of warfare, thinking them valiant against
obsolete bugaboos and oblivious of a more
subtle Satan, but, doubtful how better to
direct the age-old campaign, uncertain what
newer weapons to endue, I would rather still
be on the side of a blind and passionate ideal,
for energies may sometimes be wasted, but
ideals are never wasted.

Perhaps I have sometimes thought to
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join that other army, of man's social prog-,
ress, a noble army the thunder of whose
modern warfare rolls ever louder and louder
through the land. But I a deserter from the
thin, faint brigade that belongs to an older
fashion? A deserter now, when, in our little
rectory corps, I see the hands that grasp the
sword growing weaker, and the hands that
uphold the sword-bearer's growing frailer,
and when, in eyes keen to pierce the Enemy's
darkness, I read the growing peace prophetic
of the battle over? Back to my place in the
ranks, back beneath our tattered pennon!
What better service have I craved? What
braver banner? For on the ensigns of many
creeds I have searched, after all, only for
that one sure device which shines upon my
fathers' faith. That device is a Face, even
the face of the leader of all the host, and as
on and on I follow the march of our minis-
try,-

" That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes, but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows! "

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XXII

Some difficulties in *Doing without
Eternity

HAVE any of us noticed what a fairy-
land we lost when we stopped believ-
ing in eternity? There was a glamour and
a glitter about that past playground of reli-
gion which makes our present creed of sci-
ence barren and chilly. If to-day we write
the word Eternity in white chalk on a black-
board, and gazing at it try to recall what it
used to signify, we shall find this exercise of
the spirit most joyous. The word reminds us
how we used to slip away from hurry to
bathe in a sea of timelessness, refreshing to
every taut nerve. How we exulted and ex-
panded in the belief that eternity would give
us all that we could not get in the present,
for that was what eternity was for! We
should never again be sick or sad or bad. In
eternity we should be no longer the puny
spawn of monkeys, but beings good and great
and glorious as angels. Eternity was full of
shining light and serried ranks of singing
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hosts. Majestic figures from the past walked
its wondrous streets and we ourselves walked
with them. There was the gleaming of a
golden and immortal city, our home at last.
There was even in our vision of eternity the
presence of God.

Such was the fairyland of faith where once
we walked confidently. It is banned now
even from our fancy as irrevocably as the
elf-kingdom of the nursery. No one now be-
lieves we live after we die; it is even deemed
reprehensible to want to. Yet for those of
us who formerly possessed eternity it is hard
all at once to get used to doing without it.
We agree with science that eternity should
be abolished in the interests of an efficient
spiritual life, and yet, without eternity, we
sometimes ache with our abrupt adjustment
to being merely mortal. Creeds and other
comforts have a way of slipping away from
us without our seeing. Time and again we
can be found blindly struggling to adapt
ourselves to some deficiency in our supply of
beliefs without any clear conception of the
nature of the hole or of our resources for
either filling it or enduring it. The present
age suffers all the awkwardness of being
transitional. In a few decades babies will be
born immune to any faith or fear in regard

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to the future, but meanwhile it is well to ex-
amine closely our present difficulties in pass-
ing from immortality to annihilation, and
perhaps to discover a little help for hobble-
dehoys. A transitional period should be a
little patient with itself, for it suffers both
the growings-pains of stretching to the de-
mands of the future and the rheumatic
twinges of belonging to a decaying past.

The first difficulty of our adjustment has
the nature of a growing-pain, being due to
our still imperfect response to the commands
of science, which bewilder our dullness by
apparent contradiction. When science is all
the time bidding us to batter down doors,
it is confusing to. the mind to have science
herself declare that death is the only door
that opens nowhere. In every other depart-
ment of research we are encouraged to the
wildest flights of imagination and hypothe-
sis. It is, therefore, increasingly difficult,
as we become increasingly inured to scien-
tific adventure, to stop short before the most
provocative of all phenomena, the human
spirit in its eventful cycle. Eternity seems
the only thoroughly scientific explanation
of soul. At a mere superficial reading each
human life appears like a chapter from a
serial rather than a complete volume or a
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fugitive page tossed on the wind. The chance-
blown paragraphs reveal so much that sug-
gests a vigorously conceived plot, powerful
characterization, dramatic incident, intense
emotion, rich background, that it is almost
impossible not to formulate a synopsis of
preceding chapters, and to conjecture the
denouement following the catastrophe of
death.

It is even at times hard to withstand the
conviction that there must be an author.
One could almost suspect him of breaking off
at a crisis on purpose to make us eager for
the next installment. The figure of speech
may perhaps make clear to us the primary
trouble of our being transitional, namely, the
difficulty of being both scientific and un-
scientific at the same time, for our instinct
to understand and explain tends to destroy
our pleasure even in the torn chapter we hold
in hand; it is hard to work up a proper read-
ing enthusiasm in the face of the positive
assertion by science that there will be no
" continued-in-our-next."

The most cursory study of our bygone
belief reveals at once other troubles for the
present generation in trying too suddenly to
get along without a future. We suffer from
the working within us of old instincts and

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superstitions not to be violently uprooted —
rheumatic heritage of souls in process of
transformation. While our reason admits
that there is no valid excuse for being immor-
tal and that our perverse hankering after
such a condition argues us self-centered and
self-important, all the same there is peril in
too abruptly removing the props to personal
prestige promised by the mythical joys of our
lost fairyland. Our anticipated survival gave
us a sense of superiority to the insects, pre-
vented our being sensitive to the silent scof-
fings of the roadside stones that so long
outlast us. Evanescence tends also to under-
mine our personal affections. It hardly seems
worth while to be overfond of relative or
friend whom a breath of wind may snuff out
like a flame. Why should beings more brittle
than beetles go about loving each other as
if they were gods? Morally, human frailty
was often subconsciously controlled by keep-
ing ourselves fit for the society we expected
ultimately to enter, that of saints and sages
and perhaps of God Himself.

The first effect of destroying all these ex-
pectations is disastrous for people who were
far more dependent on them than they
dreamed, for, to tell the truth, eternity in
the old days had so little apparent relation
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to our daily conduct that the complete rejec-
tion of the concept is like that of some bodily
organ whose functioning is deemed negli-
gible until it ceases. Our suffering is no less
keen because we recognize it as purely evo-
lutional and temporary. In a few genera-
tions people will find as much inspiration in
being finite as we used to find in being infin-
ite. Meanwhile, for us who have the luck
to be transitional there is perhaps a compro-
mise.

Apart from our personal pangs, the loss
of eternity has had effects, social and politi-
cal, that intensify bur private discomfort.
Perhaps if our difficulties are clarified we may
recognize how burdened we actually are, and
be more willing to allow ourselves a make-
shift leniency. Chief among the public phe-
nomena directly traceable to the absence of
eternity is the war. On a basis of strict mor-
tality, war for aggrandizement becomes the
only legitimate activity for person or nation.
Reason shows that, since death ends all,
material things are the only things worth
getting, and even more clearly shows that,
since human beings are as finite as mosqui-
toes, they are no more worthy of preserva-
tion. Germany is the most laudably logical
nation in the world, but her logic has been a

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little uncomfortable for the nations who are
more sluggish in evolution, and who still cling
to their retrogressive respect for spiritual
valuations and to their obsolete reverence
for the human soul. Of course, if Germany
had not purified herself of all taint of faith
in eternity, she might conceivably have
waited for permeation in peace, instead of
being in such a devil of a hurry to chop a way
through for her culture. Doubtless, in the
course of time other nations will attain Ger-
many's serene heights of pure reason, but at
present it is necessary frankly to admit that
aggression, while our brains pronounce it a
most rational pastime, is still for our im-
aginations and sympathies one of the chief
temporary discomforts of doing without
eternity.

Next to the war in importance of effect
stands the high cost of living. Of course we
all know that there is enough food for every-
body to eat and enough money to pay for it,
provided that nobody wants more food than
he ought to eat, nor more money than he
ought to spend. However, now that we know
with absolute certainty that we die when we
die, any man would be a fool if he did not
try to eat as much and to spend as much as
he possibly could. Food and money are the
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only fun the finite can have, and naturally
the effort to get as much as possible of both
sends prices soaring. Without penetrating
too far into economic intricacies, one can
connect the decline in value of the Apoca-
lypse with the advance in value of eggs. The
high cost of living is directly due to the high
cost of dying; when dying costs annihilation,
people have to work pretty hard to get a
life's worth out of seventy years.

Of causes of distress taken in order of popu-
lar complaint, next to war and the high cost
of living stands the new poetry. The rela-
tion between imagism and immortality is so
obvious as to be invisible. Granted that the
aim of literature is to mirror life, the imagist
insistence on aspect versus interpretation is
inevitable, for plainly literature should not
deal with meanings when life, being mortal,
cannot have a meaning. Sensation alone
is sufficiently ephemeral to be true to life,
whereas a poem that attempts to express
some significance beneath phenomena has a
tendency to outlast its generation, and runs
the risk of endurance, and of becoming, in
some notable instances, even immortal,
whereas such a reversion toward stability
either in a poem or in a person shows each
alike false to our faith in flux.

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Those of us, however, who cannot all at
once throw off the thrall of the poor old po-
ets of our infancy must be content to go a
bit slowly, trusting that our descendants will
attain complete responsiveness to the po-
etry of the evanescent. We perceive humbly
enough how reactionary we are, but our ob-
streperous instinct for explanation corrupts
even our literary tenets so that with senile
obstinacy we sometimes wonder whether,
even from its own purely aesthetic point of
view, the new poetry does not miss some-
thing the older poetry possessed. Meaning,
adroitly introduced into a poem, sometimes
produced a pretty little art of its own, a
blending of outer and inner attributes that
had in itself a kind of grace. It is even more
heterodox to question, in looking back,
whether a poet's effort to explain was not
stimulating to his imagination, making him
actually see things more vividly in their
external aspects by his very concentration
on their inner qualities. Certainly no imagist
poet, for all his preoccupation with picture,
has ever produced as vivid descriptions as
did Browning, a poet above all others avid
for meanings.

We of to-day may as well acknowledge
first as last that our feet, set in infancy to
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the pace of eternity, will never step lively
enough for the present age. While depre-
cating the breathlessness of keeping up with
the contemporary, the most old-fashioned of
us must admire its valiancy. We are not
nearly so lazy as when we used to leave some
of our development to be accomplished after
the temporary set-back of death. Our own
muscles are a bit stiff, however, and as we
conscientiously whip them to the require-
ments of high-speed pressure, we must com-
fort ourselves with the thought that our pos-
terity will be able to fly without experiencing
any of our awkwardness.

The spiritual leisure and lethargy resulting
from a reliance on eternity to finish up what
we could not get done on earth, obviously
clogged the wheels of progress, which now
can be everywhere seen whizzing along with-
out any brakes. We open the advertising
pages of any periodical, to find that speed is
the dominant advantage offered with every
commodity. Get-healthy-quick, get-learned-
quick, get-rich-quick, are the headings under
which most of our advertisements might be
grouped. We are all familiar with the pho-
tographed faces of the people who will show
us how to reach a maximum of attainment in
a minimum of time. The gentleman with the

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arresting index finger leaps out at our lazi-
ness to teach us how to be successful in ten
lessons. Success is a word that could not
even be defined before the abolishment of
eternity, with the resultant denial of all cri-
teria but the immediate.

While haste is necessarily painful for our
still imperfectly adjusted mentality in every
department of life, we must allow for our
being peculiarly sensitive to the changes it
necessitates in the training of youth. In the
old days when death graduated us into eter-
nity, we had much more time to devote to
education. There was in our early years an
agreeable luxury in the pursuit of learning.
We did not have to practice the rigid econ-
omy of the correspondence school or of lan-
guages by phonograph. As we look back, it
seems as if minds were richer when they did
not have to be so niggardly in the luggage
they took for their journey. This is but the
sentimental vaporing of the senile, for in
our sane moments we perceive as clearly as
does the most modern pedagogue that Greek
and Latin are impedimenta to retard the boy
of to-day in the race set before him, and we
agree with the publisher-purveyors to youth
that the compendia of useful knowledge fur-
nished by them offer the handiest possible
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difficulties in 'Doing without Eternity

canned nutriment for a period that has time
only for acquisition, not for digestion.

As regards the study of the classics, we did
not at first perceive that to annul the future
involved annulling the past, and yet, practi-
cally, giving up eternity has undermined our
interest in history. Conviction of mortality
enjoins the conscience to concentrate on the
contemporary so intensely that past events
become obscure. Unless we have eternity be-
fore us we really have no time to look behind.
Yet some of us have a yearning for history
that used to find satisfaction in fancying that
our little age fitted into a sequence of ages.
It contributed to a false but agreeable com-
placency to gaze back into an endless past
as it did to gaze forward into an endless future.
Of course, abolishing eternity does not neces-
sarily obliterate the past or explicitly forbid
our going back there to visit; it merely makes
to-day so important that we have no time
whatever for yesterday.

In this matter of educational adjustment,
as in others, a transitional period suffers
enough to permit itself a little humoring of its
prejudices; we should not attach too much
guilt to a surreptitious enjoyment of the
ancients so long as we do not corrupt the
youth of our acquaintance by teaching them

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€ Djfficulties in 'Doing without Eternity

any of our respect for antique art. So long as
we are doing our conscientious best to free
our boys and girls from the cumbersomeness
of a classic education, we may feel that we
have done our duty, and may indulge a secret
delight in the dusty shelves that reveal to us
the grace that was Greece and the glory that
was Rome. It is all right so long as we don't
let the children know, for that bygone beauty
is strangely seductive and glamorous, and con-
tact with it might sap their energy in pursuing
fortune and fame and food, which should be
the sole preoccupation of people appointed to
die.

Indisputably speed must be the desidera-
tum of all activity, educational or other. Now
the chief distress we older ones experience
from speed is not that it leads to success, but
that so often it leads nowhere. The old-fash-
ioned custom of having a purpose in a pursuit
makes it difficult for us to enjoy pure giddi-
ness as heartily as do our younger contempo-
raries. Haste, first introduced as a method of
extracting from the temporary what eternity
used to supply, has become an end in itself, so
that a great many people ask nothing else of
life but to feel themselves whizzing. Since
nothing is permanent except impermanence,
the one thing to do is to go spinning along,
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cautious only to avoid bumping into a destina-
tion. As a consequence of trying to catch up in
one lifetime with all the activity of eternity,
we have acquired such exhilaration, such mo-
mentum of energy, that there is nothing we
are so afraid of as the impact of arriving some-
where. The profession of flux as a creed neces-
sitates the practice of flying as a habit. Yet
with this very profession of faith I find I have
arrived at a heresy.

Now this heresy consists of the argument
plainly approved by pure logic that if the pur-
pose of speed is to get the most out of this life
because there is no other, then no movement
at all is exactly as rational as too much, and
we have a perfect right to select any spot of
our mental landscape that suits us and sit
down on it, convinced that it is just as sensi-
ble to get our money's worth out of life's little
day by being stationary as by being giddy.
On the principle that ephemeral beings have
a right to any fun they can find is founded the
advice to our age toward which this entire dis-
cussion has been directed. Baldly stated, the
proposal is this: the best way of doing with-
out eternity is to pretend we don't have tol
The suggestion is frankly so absurd that any
reader is permitted to smile at it as freely as
does the writer. We have lost eternity and we

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difficulties in 'Doing without Eternity

can't bring it back by pretending it is still
there. The point is that we don't want to
bring it back, but We do want to discover some
way of being comfortable without it. Believ-
ing that there is no eternity, but living as if
there were, is not a process possible to all per-
sons, and is therefore urged only upon those
capable of so separating their reason and their
imagination that the two can function inde-
pendently of each other. Many people are
happily thus constituted, and still more can
become so if they try. There is, moreover, no
real sin in the course, because we are rather
true to our imaginations than false to our con-
victions, and, besides, we do no proselyting;
we merely allow our own fancy the refresh-
ment of revisiting our lost fairyland.

The chief obstacle to the compromise is
that its absurdity is exactly balanced by its
efficacy; in other words, you can't tell how
good it will feel until you try it, and if you are
an over-rational and over-conscientious per-
son you will think it beneath your dignity to
try it. Yet actually there is nothing that con-
tributes so much toward a sense of well-being
as pretending, for a few minutes every day, —
say just before getting up in the morning and
just before going to sleep at night, — that
you are going to live after you die.
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After a few weeks of this exercise, that em-
barrassment we experience in the presence of
nature becomes less painful, whereas, when
we are too acutely conscious of mortality, we
are shamed by an insensate oak, by a rock we
could pound to powder for its silent sneer at
our evanescence. If we make believe we are
as good as they are, we can hold up our heads
to the sky and the stars, and even venture to
penetrate the social exclusiveness of the sky
and the mountains. A man who pretends he is
immortal is not so deafened by the cannon of
the contemporary that he cannot hear the
still, sweet voices of the little flowers. An
association with the ancient aristocracy of
sea and forest is good for a person, but it is
almost impossible to feel at ease in this so-
ciety unless we temporarily assume an equal-
ity with it in permanence.

This secret leniency toward our abandoned
faith tends to enhance our joy in human com-
radeship as well as in that of nature. In ac-
tuality human affection is so menaced by fate
as to resemble the surreptitious whispering
in the schoolroom while the teacher's back is
turned. When the loftiest spiritual converse
may at any time be broken off by the malev-
olence of a molecule called a germ, some of
us would rather never love anybody as the

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only means of getting even with being ephem-
eral. On the other hand, if we can manage
to simulate a sense of survival, and can pic-
ture death as a mere voyage, we can enjoy
comradeship up to the very last minute, and
shout confident au revoirs even while the boat
is pulling out to sea.

A faith in a future secretly indulged is stim-
ulating to mentality. If we assume for a few
minutes even in jest that perhaps our life's
chapter has a meaning, instantly our inge-
nuity is off to invent other chapters past and
future. Before we know it our minds are glow-
ing as we discover some passage of grand and
sustained style, or are tingling with the glori-
ous guesswork of an entire synopsis. If we are
gifted with any dramatic instinct, we are as
likely as not, while we turn the pages, to
find ourselves appropriating the hero's part,
and bearing ourselves a bit more nobly, with
a dim notion of being destined to still greater
actions in the next installment. Pretending
that perhaps after all our life has a meaning
makes us acquit ourselves rather better than
we otherwise should in the tragic episodes,
and makes us enjoy the comic scenes with a
twinkle kindled at imperishable fires. Even
hazarded surmises about the creatorship of
our life's romance sometimes give a sense of
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rest and relief not as yet afforded by the
prevalent doctrine of pure flux.

A little self-indulgence in eternity will not
only enfranchise our conversation with our
contemporaries and quicken our brains to
decipher the book of humanity, but will tend
to keep our minds, manners, and morals in
trim for association with the great and good of
all ages. We used to believe the halls of the
dead were thronged with noble spirits toward
whose wisdom and beauty our pilgrim feet
would surely sometime find the way. This
hope helped us to keep ourselves in order,
much as the exiled Englishman restrains him-
self from slumping by donning his dress-suit
in the jungle solitude. Of course, when evolu-
tion from the eternal to the ephemeral is fully
accomplished, nobody will need any fillip to
personal prestige, but for us poor intermedi-
ates, painfully hobbledehoy, it is a secret
education in noble manners to pretend to our-
selves that some day we shall be called upon
to meet Socrates or Buddha or Christ.

Why not have a little patience with our-
selves, we poor devils who have to bear all
the brunt of the transition from eternity to
evanescence? If we promise not to corrupt
advancing youth, if we promise not even to
corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith,

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can't we safely play that our life's chapter is
going to be continued?

For, after all, what if there should be an
Author?

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